But the great object, and the principal effect of all these agreements, is this:  it is to ensure uniformity of remuneration, the same wage for the same work, and to protect the most necessitous and most helpless workers from being forced to take less than the employers can afford to pay.  Broadly speaking, the rate of pay, in these highly organised industries, is determined by the value of the work and not by the need of the worker.  That makes an enormous difference.  But in sweated industries this is not the case.  Sweated industries are the unorganised industries, those in which there is no possibility of organisation among the workers.  Here the individual worker, without resources and without backing, is left, in the struggle of unregulated competition, to take whatever he can get, regardless of what others may be getting for the same work and-of the value of the work itself.  Hence the extraordinary inequality of payment for the same kind of work and the generally low average of payment which are the distinguishing features of all sweated industries.

Now, if you have followed this rather dry argument, I shall probably have your concurrence when I say, that the proposal that the State should intervene to secure, not an all-round minimum wage, but the same wages for the same work, and nothing less than the standard rate of his particular work for every worker, is not a proposition that the State should do something new, or exceptional, or impracticable.  It is a proposal that the State should do for the weakest and most helpless trades what the strongly-organised trades already do for themselves.  I cannot see that there is anything unreasonable, much less revolutionary or subversive, in that suggestion.

This proposal has taken practical form in a Bill presented to the House of Commons last session.  Whether the measure reached its second reading or not I do not know.  It was a Bill for the establishment of Wages Boards in certain industries employing great numbers of workpeople, such as tailoring, shirtmaking, and so on.  The industries selected were those in which the employes, though numerous, are hopelessly disorganised and unable to make a bargain for themselves.  And the Bill provided that where any six persons, whether masters or employes, applied to the Home Secretary for the establishment of a Wages Board, such a Board should be created in the particular industry and district concerned; that it should consist of representatives of employers and employed in equal proportions, with an impartial chairman; and that it should have the widest possible discretion to fix rates of remuneration.  If Wages Boards were established, as the Bill proposed, they would simply do for sweated trades what is already constantly being done in organised trades, with no doubt one important difference, that the decisions of these Boards would be enforceable by law.  Now that no doubt may seem to many of you a drastic proposition.  But I would strongly recommend any