ABSTRACT
In endeavouring, therefore, to relate the human to the economic costs of production of any quantity of material wealth or services, it would be necessary to consider how far the conditions of employment tend to economise human costs by distributing the burden proportionately to the power to bear it. The human wastes or excessive costs, entailed by conditions of employment which impose unequal burdens upon workers with equal capacity to bear them, or which distribute the burden unequally in time over the same set of workers, alternating slack periods with periods of excessive over-time, are obvious. Unfortunately the operation of our industrial system has not hitherto taken these into sufficient account. Though the physical, moral and social injuries, due to alternating periods of over and under work, are generally admitted, the full costs of such irregularity, human and even economic, are far from being adequately realised. While some attempts at ‘decasualisation’ are being made, the larger and more wasteful irregularities of seasonal and cyclical fluctuations are still regarded as irremediable. By the workers themselves and even by social reformers, the injury inflicted upon wages and the standard of living by irregularity of employment is appreciated far more adequately than the related injury inflicted on the physique and morale of the worker by sandwiching periods of over-exertion between intervals of idleness.
