Sailing by a Distant Star.

1. What direction or guide does our present Act contain as to what should be the standard wage in the different callings? Absolutely none. Nowhere in the original Act or in any of its amendments is there any hint or reference as to what that wage should be. The Court itself has not as far as I know ever propounded any basis. One can see from looking along its career that it has sought to effect the readjustment which is essential to bring the methods and the shares of modern pro- page 11 duction into closer and closer union with true social welfare. But this is sailing by a distant star often lost in haze. One general result of it's award rates of wages fixed as a minimum has been to make that wage the standard—at once the minimum and the maximum—with such discouraging effects upon the workers as I have already fully indicated.

Now the Court must not and does not proceed by haphazard methods. What basis then for fixing wages has it mainly employed? Plainly not a competitive standard, for that would fix itself without the intervention of the Court by the market rate; and, moreover, the competitive standard was one which the Court was especially established to check. Equally plainly it cannot be a profit-sharing standard. This the Court has indeed expressly stated and declined, as it had to decline, to enter upon an inquiry as to the profits of all the employers as a basis of wages.