|
Adam Smith on the Minimum Wage?
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is the fountainhead of arguments for the free market
and for a laissez-faire, "hands-off" approach to government management of a nation's economy. But Smith's
work is full of surprises. The first part of the following passage, on the conspiracy of employers, is fairly well known,
but the paragraph after it, written a century before the first minimum wage was passed or even named as such, is
less so. The selection is from the chapter on the wages of labor.
....Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination,
not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate....We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it the usual
and, one may say, the natural state of things which nobody every hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular
combiantions to sink the wages of labor even below this rate....Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary
defensive combination of workmen....
But though in disputes with their workmen masters must generally have the advantage, there is
however a certain rate below which it seems impossible to reduce, for any considerable time, the ordinary wages even of the
lowest species of work.
A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him.
They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the
race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose
that the lowest species of common laborers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that one with
another they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labor of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the
children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself. But one half the children born, it is computed,
die before the age of manhood. The poorest laborers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt
to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance
of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man. The labor of an able-bodied slave, the same author
adds, is computed to be worth double his maintenance; and that of the meanest laborer, he thinks, cannot be worth less than
that of an able-bodied slave. Thus far at least it seems certain that, in order to bring up a family, the labor of the
husband and wife together must, even in the lowest species of common labor, be able to earn something more than what is precisely
necessary for their own maintenance....
Click your back button to return to the site.
--Brock Haussamen, October 2007
|
