23
INCENTIVE
WHEN we come to the objections to equal division of income we find that most of them come to no more than this: that we are not accustomed to it, and have taken unequal division between classes so much for granted that we have never thought any other state of things possible, not to mention that the teachers and preachers appointed for us by the rich governing class have carefully hammered into us from our childhood that it is wicked and foolish to question the right of some people to be much better off than others.
Still, there are other objections. So many of them have been already disposed of in our examination of the schemes for unequal distribution that we need deal now with two only.
The first is that unless a woman were allowed to get more money than another she would have no incentive to work harder.
One answer to this is that nobody wants her to work harder than another at the national task. On the contrary, it is desirable that the burden of work, without which there could be no income to divide, should be shared equally by the workers. If those who are never happy unless they are working insist on putting in extra work to please themselves, they must not pretend that this is a painful sacrifice for which they should be paid; and, anyhow, they can always work off their superfluous energy on their hobbies.
On the other hand, there are people who grudge every moment they have to spend in working. That is no excuse for letting them off their share. Anyone who does less than her share of work, and yet takes her full share of the wealth produced by work, is a thief, and should be dealt with as any other sort of thief is dealt with.
But Weary Willie may say that he hates work, and is quite willing to take less, and be poor and dirty and ragged or even naked for the sake of getting off with less work. But that, as we have seen, cannot be allowed: voluntary poverty is just as mischievous socially as involuntary poverty: decent nations must insist on their citizens leading decent lives, doing their full share of the nation’s work, and taking their full share of its income. When Weary Willie has done his bit he can be as lazy as he likes. He will have plenty of leisure to lie on his back and listen to the birds, or watch his more impetuous neighbors working furiously at their hobbies, which may be sport, exploration, literature, the arts, the sciences, or any of the activities which we pursue for their own sakes when our material needs are satisfied. But poverty and social irresponsibility will be forbidden luxuries. Poor Willie will have to submit, not to compulsory poverty as at present, but to the compulsory well-being which he dreads still more.
However, there are mechanical difficulties in the way of freedom to work more or less than others in general national production. Such work is not nowadays separate individual work: it is organized associated work, carried on in great factories and offices in which work begins and ends at fixed hours. Our clothes, for instance, are mostly washed in steam laundries in which all the operations which used to be performed by one woman with her own tub, mangle, and ironing board are divided among groups of women using machinery and buildings which none of them could use single-handed even if she could afford to buy them, assisted by men operating a steam power plant. If some of these women or men were to offer to come an hour earlier or stay two hours later for extra wages the reply would be that such an arrangement was impossible, as they could do nothing without the co-operation of the rest. The machinery would not work for them unless the engine was going. It is a case of all or nobody.
In short, associated work and factory work: that is to say, the sort of work that makes it possible for our great modern civilized populations to exist, would be impossible if every worker could begin when she liked and leave off when she liked. In many factories the pace is set for the lazy and energetic alike by the engine. The railway service would not be of much use if the engine driver and the guard were to stop the train to look at a football match when they felt inclined that way. Casual people are useless in modern industry; and the other sort: those who want to work longer and harder than the rest, find that they cannot do it except in comparatively solitary occupations. Even in domestic service, where the difference between the unpunctual slacker and sloven and the model servant is very perceptible, the routine of the household keeps everybody up to a certain mark below which a servant is discharged as unemployable. And the slacker neither accepts lower wages nor can be cured by higher.
No external incentive is needed to make first-rate workers do the best work they can: their trouble is that they can seldom make a living by it. First-rate work is done at present under the greatest discouragement. There is the impossibility of getting paid as much for it as for second-rate work. When it is not paid for at all, there is the difficulty of finding leisure for it whilst earning a living at common work. People seldom refuse a higher employment which they feel capable of undertaking. When they do, it is because the higher employment is so much worse paid or so unsuitable to their social position that they cannot afford to take it. A typical case is that of a non-commissioned officer in the army refusing a commission. If the quartermaster-sergeant’s earnings and expenses came to no more than those of the officer, and both men were of the same class, no inducement in the way of extra money would be needed to make any soldier accept promotion to the highest rank in which he felt he could do himself credit. When he refuses, as he sometimes does, it is because he would be poorer and less at home in the higher than in the lower rank.
But what about the dirty work? We are so accustomed to see dirty work done by dirty and poorly paid people that we have come to think that it is disgraceful to do it, and that unless a dirty and disgraced class existed it would not be done at all. This is nonsense. Some of the dirtiest work in the world is done by titled surgeons and physicians who are highly educated, highly paid, and move in the best society. The nurses who assist them are often their equals in general education, and sometimes their superiors in rank. Nobody dreams of paying nurses less or respecting them less than typists in city offices, whose work is much cleaner. Laboratory work and anatomical work, which involves dissecting dead bodies, and analysing the secretions and excretions of live ones, is sometimes revoltingly dirty from the point of view of a tidy housekeeper; yet it has to be done by gentlemen and ladies of the professional class. And every tidy housekeeper knows that houses cannot be kept clean without dirty work. The bearing and nursing of children are by no means elegant drawingroom amusements; but nobody dares suggest that they are not in the highest degree honorable, nor do the most fastidiously refined women shirk their turn when it comes.
It must be remembered too that a great deal of work which is now dirty because it is done in a crude way by dirty people can be done in a clean way by clean people. Ladies and gentlemen who attend to their own motor cars, as many of them do, manage to do it with less mess and personal soiling than a slovenly general servant will get herself into when laying a fire. On the whole, the necessary work of the world can be done with no more dirt than healthy people of all classes can stand. The truth of the matter is that it is not really the work that is objected to so much as its association with poverty and degradation. Thus a country gentleman does not object to drive his car; but he would object very strongly to wear the livery of his chauffeur; and a lady will tidy up a room without turning a hair, though she would die rather than be seen in a parlormaid’s cap and apron, neat and becoming as they are. These are as honorable as any other uniform, and much more honorable than the finery of an idle woman: the parlormaids are beginning to object to them only because they have been associated in the past with a servile condition and a lack of respect to which parlormaids are no longer disposed to submit. But they have no objection to the work. Both the parlormaid and her employer (I dare not say her mistress), if they are fond of flowers and animals, will grub in a garden all day, or wash dogs or rid them of vermin with the greatest solicitude, without considering the dirt involved in these jobs in the least derogatory to their dignity. If all dustmen were dukes nobody would object to the dust: the dustmen would put little pictures on their notepaper of their hats with flaps down the backs just as now dukes put little pictures of their coronets; and everyone would be proud to have a dustman to dinner if he would condescend to come. We may take it that nobody objects to necessary work of any kind because of the work itself; what everybody objects to is being seen doing something that is usually done only by persons of lower rank or by colored slaves. We sometimes even do things badly on purpose because those who do them well are classed as our inferiors. For example, a foolish young gentleman of property will write badly because clerks write well; and the ambassador of a republic will wear trousers instead of knee-breeches and silk stockings at court, because, though breeches and stockings are handsomer, they are a livery; and republicans consider liveries servile.
Still, when we have put out of our heads a great deal of nonsense about dirty work, the fact remains that though all useful work may be equally honorable, all useful work is most certainly not equally agreeable or equally exhausting. To escape facing this fact we may plead that some people have such very queer tastes that it is almost impossible to mention an occupation that you will not find somebody with a craze for. There is never any difficulty in finding a willing hangman. There are men who are happy keeping lighthouses on rocks in the sea so remote and dangerous that it is often months before they can be relieved. And a lighthouse is at least steady, whereas a lightship may never cease rolling about in a way that would make most of us wish ourselves dead. Yet men are found to man lightships for wages and pensions no better than they could find in good employment on shore. Mining seems a horrible and unnatural occupation; but it is not unpopular. Children left to themselves do the most uncomfortable and unpleasant things to amuse themselves, very much as a blackbeetle, though it has the run of the house, prefers the basement to the drawingroom. The saying that God never made a job but He made a man or woman to do it is true up to a certain point.
But when all possible allowances are made for these idiosyncrasies it remains true that it is much easier to find a boy who wants to be a gardener or an engine driver, and a girl who wants to be a film actress or a telephone operator, than a boy who wants to be a sewerman, or a girl who wants to be a ragpicker. A great deal can be done to make unpopular occupations more agreeable; and some of them can be got rid of altogether, and would have been got rid of long ago if there had been no class of very poor and rough people to put them upon. Smoke and soot can be done away with; sculleries can be made much pleasanter than most solicitors’ offices; the unpleasantness of a sewerman’s work is already mostly imaginary; coal mining may be put an end to by using the tides to produce electric power; and there are many other ways in which work which is now repulsive can be made no irksomer than the general run of necessary labor. But until this happens all the people who have no particular fancy one way or the other will want to do the pleasanter sorts of work.
Fortunately there is a way of equalizing the attraction of different occupations. And this brings us to that very important part of our lives that we call our leisure. Sailors call it their liberty.
There is one thing that we all desire; and that is freedom. By this we mean freedom from any obligation to do anything except just what we like, without a thought of tomorrow’s dinner or any other of the necessities that make slaves of us. We are free only as long as we can say “My time is my own”. When workers working ten hours a day agitate for an eight-hour day, what they really want is not eight hours work instead of ten, but sixteen hours off duty instead of fourteen. And out of this sixteen hours must come eight hours sleep and a few hours for eating and drinking, dressing and undressing, washing and resting; so that even with an eight hours working day the real leisure of the workers: that is, the time they have after they are properly rested and fed and cleaned up and ready for any adventures or amusements or hobbies they care for, is no more than a few hours; and these few are reduced in value by the shortness of daylight in winter, and cut down by the time it takes to get into the country or wherever is the best place to enjoy oneself. Married women, whose working place is the man’s home, want to get away from home for recreation, just as men want to get away from the places where they work; in fact a good deal of our domestic quarrelling arises because the man wants to spend his leisure at home whilst the woman wants to spend hers abroad. Women love hotels: men hate them.
Take, however, the case of a man and his wife who are agreed in liking to spend their leisure away from home. Suppose the man’s working day is eight hours, and that he spends eight hours in bed and four over his breakfast, dinner, washing, dressing, and resting. It does not follow that he can have four hours to spare for amusement with his wife every day. Their spare four hours are more likely to be half wasted in waiting for the theatre or picture show to begin; for they must leave the open air amusements, tennis, golf, cycling, and the seaside, for the week-end or Bank Holiday. Consequently he is always craving for more leisure. This is why we see people preferring rough and strict employments which leave them some time to themselves to much more gentle situations in which they are never free. In a factory town it is often impossible to get a handy and intelligent domestic servant, or indeed to get a servant at all. That is not because the servant need work harder or put up with worse treatment than the factory girl or the shop assistant, but because she has no time she can call her own. She is always waiting on the doorbell even when you dare not ring the drawingroom bell lest she should rush up and give notice. To induce her to stay, you have to give her an evening out every fortnight; then one every week; then an afternoon a week as well; then two afternoons a week; then leave to entertain her friends in the drawingroom and use the piano occasionally (at which times you must clear out of your own house); and the end is that, long before you have come to the end of the concessions you are expected to make, you discover that it is not worth keeping a servant at all on such terms, and take to doing the housework yourself with modern labor saving appliances. But even if you put up with the evenings out and all the rest of it, the girl has still no satisfying sense of freedom; she may not want to stay out all night even for the most innocent purposes; but she wants to feel that she might if she liked. That is human nature.
We now see how we can make compensatory arrangements as between people who do more or less agreeable and easy sorts of work. Give more leisure, earlier retirement into the superannuated class, more holidays, in the less agreeable employments, and they will be as much sought after as the more agreeable ones with less leisure. In a picture gallery you will find a nicely dressed lady sitting at a table with nothing to do but to tell anyone who asks what is the price of any particular picture, and take an order for it if one is given. She has many pleasant chats with journalists and artists; and if she is bored she can read a novel. Her desk chair is comfortable; and she takes care that it shall be near the stove. But the gallery has to be scrubbed and dusted every day; and its windows have to be kept clean. It is clear that the lady’s job is a much softer one than the charwoman’s. To balance them you must either let them take their turns at the desk and at the scrubbing on alternate days or weeks; or else, as a first-rate scrubber and duster and cleaner might make a very bad business lady, and a very attractive business lady might make a very bad scrubber, you must let the charwoman go home and have the rest of the day to herself earlier than the lady at the desk.
Public picture galleries, in which the pictures are not sold, require the services of guardians who have nothing to do but wear a respectable uniform and see that people do not smoke nor steal the pictures, nor poke umbrellas through them when pointing out their beauties. Compare this work with that of the steel smelter, who has to exercise great muscular strength among blast furnaces and pools of molten metal; that is to say, in an atmosphere which to an unaccustomed person would seem the nearest thing to hell on earth! It is true that the steel smelter would very soon get bored with the gallery attendant’s job, and would go back to the furnaces and the molten metal sooner than stick it; whilst the gallery attendant could not do the steel smelter’s job at all, being too old, or too soft, or too lazy, or all three combined. One is a young man’s job and the other an old man’s job. We balance them at present by paying the steel smelter more wages. But the same effect can be produced by giving him more leisure, either in holidays or shorter hours. The workers do this themselves when they can. When they are paid, not by time, but by the piece; and when through a rise in prices or a great rush of orders they find that they can earn twice as much in a week as they are accustomed to live on, they can choose between double wages and double leisure. They usually choose double leisure, taking home the same money as before, but working from Monday to Wednesday only, and taking a Thursday to Saturday holiday. They do not want more work and more money: they want more leisure for the same work, which proves that money is not the only incentive to work, nor the strongest. Leisure, or freedom, is stronger when the work is not pleasurable in itself.