ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on wages that are taken to mean money wages corrected. From many parts of the country readers have heard of cases where farmers would willingly raise wages but for fear of local opinion. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between two principal sorts of unfair wage. On the one hand, wages may be unfair in some place or occupation, because, though they are equal to the value of the marginal net product of the labour assembled there, this is not equal to the value of the marginal net product, and, therefore, to the wage rate, of similar labour assembled elsewhere. On the other hand, wages may be unfair in some place or occupation, because work-people are exploited, in the sense that they are paid less than the value which their marginal net product has to the firms employing them. Consequently, interference designed to force up wages to the fair level must benefit the national dividend.
