The Daily Alaska empire., 1936-07-02
Labor as a Commodity
(New York Times)

In his speech Dallas the President declared that If labor is to be commodity in the United States it means that we shall become nation of board ing houses instead of nation of homes. The state ment that labor is not should not be commodity has been familiar for many years It will help con- sderably clarify thought if ask ourselves pre- cisely what the statement means, and in just what sense it may be true and in what sense false.
 The statement is surely justified as the declara- ton of moral attitude Labor is not simply an item in the cost of production; it is what man has to offer for his living and his welfare The worker as human being, is an end, not means. He cannot be treated as chatte He should never be con- sdered solely in his role as worker, but always at the time, citizen and man.
 But the statement that labor is not a commodity is false if it is taken to that labor is not subject to the laws of supply and demand, or that 1t can be considered apart from ordinary economic forces. Even the people who sometimes talk as If this were true do not really believe it. They recognize that the price of labor fixed by supply and demand just as that of a commodity is Many of their policies are built on that assumption. When sellers wish to raise the price of commodity they agree among themselves not to underbid each other to hold, instead for a fixed price and perhaps to deal with buyers collec lively instead of separately. When labor unions wish to raise wages they follow the policies. Another device of sellers for raising the price of their con- modity is to reduce the supply of it. Certain unions do this for wages their particular line by restricting admission into the union Some union leaders, think ing of the supply of labor not in terms of men but of hours would like to create an artificial shortage of labor through the thirty-hour week. The true supply of labor, however, is neither men nor man. hours considered alone but man-hour- productivity
 In all the policies just described labor is treated as if it subject to the type of forces affect commodities. Where this attitude is usually abandoned is in discussions of wage rates. We know what happens to commodity under governmental or monopostic price-fixng. The price is usually begged too high Part of the commodity then remains unsold We have that occur under the old Farm Board market operations and with cotton more gently under the twelvecent loan policy, The same sort of result appears when certain levels placed too high thereby either creating proongng unemployment. In such cases, those who have jobs at the higher wages sold them, in effect at the eX pense of those who without work at all This surplus labor thus arbitrarily created must then be taken of by relief payments much lower than could be obtained through wages while it does not create the wealth that employed labor does.
 That labor is not commodity, in short, is true if talk of ends but misleading if we talk of means Our end is to achieve the highest welfare for labor possible the largest total income most equitably dis tributed But do this best by recognizing that labor is integral part of the whole economic or ganism and subject to the same laws that control other parts of that organism.