The Journal of Religious History Vol. 20, No. 1, June 1996

KEVIN BLACKBURN

The Living Wage in Australia: A Secularization of Catholic Ethics on Wages, 1891-1907

In Australia, during the early part of the twentieth century, an idea that had its origins in the medieval doctrines of the Catholic Church was given legal form. The idea was that the state should guarantee a ‘living wage’ which must be sufficient to support the wage-earner, his wife, and his family in ‘reasonable and frugal comfort’. It became legally enshrined in the wages fixed by Australia’s foremost industrial tribunal, the Australian Com- monwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration. The tribunal’s Harvester Judgment in 1907 set a living wage as the reward for the unskilled wage- earner, with margins or increments above that level for skilled workers. This historical parallel suggests a question: was the phenomenon the result of a process in which an idea tied to Catholic doctrine was taken and applied to a social problem of the early twentieth century? Was the religious content of the idea of a living wage then removed as it underwent a process of secularization?

To many observers, the living wage of the Australian industrial tribunals appeared to be drawn out of the ideas of the Catholic Church. The observa- tion was highlighted by Catholic polemicists in Australia who wanted to see their church as the originator of an idea that was widely acclaimed as socially progressive throughout much of the early twentieth century. However, many non-Catholics also have claimed that the origins of Australia’s minimum wage laws lay in Catholic ideas of the living wage. The task of this article is to examine the evidence that supports the claim that the Australian living wage was drawn from Catholicism.

In the medieval doctrines of the Catholic Church, the living wage encap- sulated an ideology of work that was articulated by St Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century. Aquinas advised the individual not to work beyond the point where the necessities of life had been provided for:

External goods come under the head of things useful for an end. . . Hence it must needs be that man’s good in their respect consists in a certain measure, in other words, that man seeks according to a certain measure, to have external riches, in so far as they are necessary for him to live in keeping with his condition of life.

Kevin Blackburn is Lecturer in History, Nanyang Technological University, National Institute of Education, Singapore.

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Wherefore it will be a sin for him to exceed this measure, by wishing to acquire or keep them immoderately.’

Aquinas preached that a life devoted to work and the pursuit of worldly goods was an immoral existence. For Aquinas, what he called the ‘contem- plative life’ of leisure and devotion to religion was ‘more perfect than the active life occupied with the bustle of business’.* Leisure for the contempla- tive life, wrote Aquinas, ‘pursues man’s proper course, namely, the way of the mind, whereas the active life is occupied with the instincts we share with animal^'.^ He proposed that the individual should earn only enough to pro- vide a reasonable standard of comfort - a living wage.

This theological tradition of the living wage was given legal form in medieval Europe, which had its economic regulations and labour laws domin- ated by the ethics of the Catholic Church. After the thirteenth century, both the church and the state fixed wages and prices according to moral precepts that were influenced by the ecclesiastical principles of Aquinas and other theologian^.^ In 1348, during the labour shortages in the time of the Black Death, Edward I11 of England proclaimed the Statute or Ordinance of La- bourers, which legally created the living wage in England. The necessity of keeping wages down during a labour shortage had helped give substance to Aquinas’ theological concept. The Statute reaffirmed that ‘no man shall pay or promise to pay any man more wages, liveries, hire or salaries than is accustomed’, and that the individual ‘be compelled to labour for the neces- sities of life’.s

Even in Tudor times, the living wage concept regulated wages. In 1563 the Statute of Artificers, Labourers, Servant in Husbandry and Apprentices stated that Justices of the Peace ‘shall yearly rate the wages of every artificer, labourer, servant, or workman’.6 Although this decreed a maximum wage, there is evidence to suggest that many justices of the peace applied it as a minimum wage.’ Whatever may have been the intent - whether as a maxi- mum or a minimum - the 1563 labour legislation was designed to set up a living wage tied to the cost of living.’

1 . Province, London 1947, p. 1517. 2.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican

Thomas Aquinas, St Thomas Aquinas: Theological Texts, trans. T. Gilbey, London 1955, p. 266. 3. 4.

Aquinas, Theological Texts, p. 264. See W. J. Ashley, An Introduction to Economic History, Vol. 2, London 1909, pp. 384-5;

and W. Cunningham: The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, Vol. 1, rev. edn, Cambridge 1910, pp. 252-8. For later expositions on this point see R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1937, pp. 62-4; and R. H. Tawney, ‘The Assessment of Wages in England by Justices of the Peace’ and R. K. Kelsal, ‘Wage Regulation Under the Statute of Artificers’, both in Wages in Pre-Industrial England, W. E. Minchton (ed.), Newton Abbot 1977, pp. 49, 159, 173. 5 . English Economic History, A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney (eds), London 1914, pp. 165-6. 6. English Economic History, p. 160. 7. R. K. Kelsal, ‘Wage Regulation Under the Statute of Artificers’, in Minchton, Wages in Pre-

~~

Industrial England, p. 168. 8. Tawney, ‘The Assessment of Wages in England bv the Justices of Peace’, in Wacs in Pre- Industrial England, p. 61.

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The living wage was actually strengthened under the Stuart king, James I, when in 1604 the ‘Act Fixing a Minimum Wage’ was proclaimed.’ With the Reformation and the rise of laissezfaire capitalism, the Statute of Labourers gradually fell into disuse. Finally, in 1813, on a motion introduced into the House of Commons by Serjeant Onslow, it was repealed; upon which a group of manufacturers presented Onslow with a special plate for his ‘champion- ship of commercial liberty’.’’ The exigencies of the Industrial Revolution had swept away the remnants of medieval economics.

Then on 8 November 1907, in Australia, the Harvester Judgment by Justice Higgins of the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration set the living wage as the remuneration for the unskilled wage-earner. He fixed the living wage at seven shillings a day. Under the Federal system of industrial arbitration, the average wage-earner was to be rewarded for the work he had done by a uniform wage based on the ‘normal needs of the average employee regarded as a human being living in a civilised community’.” ‘Normal needs’ was defined as a minimum standard ‘sufficient to ensure the workman food, shelter, clothing, frugal comfort, provision for evil days’.’’

Higgins rejected the payment by results principle, and asserted that wages were to be based on ethics not profit: ‘the remuneration of the employee is not dependent on the profits of the particular employer’; ‘the conditions as to remuneration must be fair and reasonable whether the profits are small or great’.I3 In 1909 Higgins told the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited that it was better for a mine or a company to close down if it could not pay the living wage. In this case Higgins repeated that ‘the remuneration of the employee cannot be allowed to depend on the profits made by the individual empl~yer’ ; ’~ and he stated that ‘unless great multitudes of people are to be irretrievably injured in themselves and in their families, unless society is to be perpetually in industrial unrest, it is necessary to keep this living wage as a thing sacrosanct, beyond the reach of bargaining’.’’ In 191 I Higgins again affirmed that whether industry could afford to pay ‘ought not to affect the amount of the basic or living wage’.I6

The idea that a living or minimum wage was intellectually associated with Catholicism and the Middle Ages did not go unnoticed by writers on Austral- ian society. During the twentieth century Australian intellectuals traced the living or minimum wage back to the living wage declared during medieval times.

During 1909, in a reference to the living wage and the arbitration system,

9. 10. Wage, New York 1932, p. 29. 11. referred to as CAR] (1907). p. 4. 12. Harvester Judgment, p. 4. 13. Harvester Judgment, p. 4. 14. Hill Proprietary Company, 3 CAR (1909) p. 32. 15. 16.

G. V. Portus, Milestones in Economic History, London 1949, p. 84. B. Armstrong, Insuring the Essentials: Minimum Wage Plus Social Insurance - a Living

Harvester Judgment (Ex parte McKay), 2 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports [Hereafter

The Barrier Branch ofthe Amalgamated Miners’ Association of Broken Hill v . The Broken

3 CAR (1909), p. 32. Australian Workers’ Union v . The Pastoralists Federal Council, 5 CAR (1911), p. 73.

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P. S. Cleary, who was later to be the President of the Catholic Federation in Australia (1913-19), told the Australasian Catholic Congress that ‘our social legislation brings us back to the system which St Thomas of Aquinas ex- plained and Pope Leo XI11 restated six hundred years later’.’’ Cleary added that ‘the immense fabric which has arisen in our time - unions, departments, courts and protecting institutions - is but a renewal of the work, a continu- ation of the policy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’.’’

Over twenty years later when the living wage had reached its greatest extent, W. K. Hancock, an Australian historian, remarked on how ‘in modem Australia, as in medieval Europe the ideal of “fair and reasonable” has found expression’ in the linking of wages to the cost of living.’’ Hancock com- pared the principle of ‘fair and reasonable’, used by the Federal Arbitration Court to set the living wage, to the medieval concept of the just price.” In his essay ‘A Veray True and Comyn’, Hancock wrote of how unusual it was that the ‘ideas of Tudor England should have found, three centuries later, a new home in a land which to the sixteenth century was terra australis incognita’.’’

In 1933 G. V. Portus, an Australian economic historian, saw the Harvester Judgment as a case of the state prescribing a living wage, ‘just as it did in the Middle Ages, when the Church ordained and enforced, “fair wages” and “just prices”’.’’ Higgins’ living wage was, according to G. W. Irving, a Melbourne barrister and Economics master at Scotch College, perhaps a mod- em restatement of medieval principles, a wage based, not upon supply and demand, but upon the conception of a just pri~e’.’~

In 1943 the devout Catholic judge of the Federal Arbitration Court, Raymond Kelly, and judges H. B. Piper and T. O’Mara, noted that the Court’s prescrip- tion of a living wage had been drawn from Pope Leo XIII’s restatement of the medieval wage provisions in his 1891 Encyclical on labour, Rerum Novarum. They said that the Court’s interpretation of the living wage was similar to that which the ‘Papal Encyclical of 1891’ had proclaimed: ‘the remuneration of labour must be enough to support the wage earner in reason- able frugal comfort’ and ‘a workman’s wage be sufficient to maintain him- self, his wife and his children in reasonable comfort’.24 In 1951 the senior master at the Catholic Xavier College in Melbourne, James Dynon, wrote in the Catholic social magazine Twentieth Cenrury of the parallel between the living wage of Catholicism of the medieval period and the minimum wage, or what was by then called the ‘basic’ wage, of the Australian wages system.

17. P. S. Cleary, ‘The Church and the Worker’, The Third Australasian Catholic Congress, Sydney 1909, p. 255. 18. Cleary, ‘The Church and the Worker’, p. 269. 19. W. K. Hancock, Australia, London 1930, p. 160. 20. W. K. Hancock, ‘Law in Australian Industry’, New Statesman, 13 October 1928. 21. W. K. Hancock, Politics in Pitcairn and Other Essays, London 1947, p. 108. 22. G. V. Portus, Australia: An Economic Interpretation, Sydney 1933, p. 81. 23. G. W. Irving, Caveman to Capitalist: An Introduction to Economic History for Australian Readers, London 1935, pp. 378-9. 24. ‘Judgment - Munition Workers (re Rates for Females)’, 50 CAR (1943), p. 202; and see B. Dabscheck, Arbifration at Work, Sydney 1983, p. 33.

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For Dynon and other Catholics, the Reformation and the rise of capitalism swept away the institutions of the Catholic Church which had ensured ‘just’ wages.25

During the 1960s and 1970s other Australian intellectuals compared or traced its system of wage regulation to its medieval ancestor. Donald Home’s 1964 study of Australia, The Lucky Country, described the Basic Wage and the Federal arbitration system as creating an atmosphere where ‘it is almost as if a medieval court took over the economic planning of Australia’.26 In 1970 John Hutson, from the Amalgamated Engineering Union, wrote that Australia’s living wage had an antecedent during medieval times when ‘the purpose of work was considered to be the satisfaction of human needs only and not the accumulation of wealth; it was therefore considered necessary [for a worker to] to maintain himself and his family in reasonable comfort according to the station he had in so~iety’.’~

Despite these observations, little work has been done on substantiating whether Australia’s living wage had its intellectual roots in Catholicism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s P. G. Macarthy - in his PhD thesis and later articles on the Harvester Judgment - suggested that the impetus for the seven shillings living wage came from Higgins’ wanting to restore wages to the level that they were at before the depression of the 1890~:~ This does not explain why the language that Higgins used to define his minimum wage (that a wage should be enough to provide ‘reasonable and frugal comfort’ for the wage-earner, his wife, and family) was a copy of that used by Pope Leo XI11 to outline his living wage in Rerum Novarum. In 1984 John Rickard, in his excellent biography of Higgins, stated that there was a probable link between the Catholic living wage and the minimum wage of Justice Higgins and drew the comparison between the very same terms that Higgins used to describe the wage and those that Leo XI11 had ~ s e d . 2 ~ He also brought to light a speech that Higgins made in 1896 in which he praised Leo XIII’s encyclical on labour and embraced his definition of a living wage. This is strong enough to suggest that Higgins was in fact using Pope Leo XIII’s words when he declared a living wage on 8 November 1907.

The trouble is that in the transcript of the judgment on the living wage, and afterwards, Higgins did not disclose the source from where he derived his

25. J. Dynon, ‘The Social Doctrine of Leo XI11 and Australia’, Twentieth Century, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 1951, pp. 12-13. 26. D. Home, The Lucky Country, Harmondsworth 1964, p. 141. 27. J. Hutson, Six Wage Concepts, Suny Hills 1970, p. 25. 28. P. G. Macarthy, The Harvester Judgment: An Historical Assessment, F’hD thesis, Australian National University 1968; P. G. Macarthy, ‘Victorian Wages Boards: Their Origin and the Doctrine of the Living Wage’, Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 10, 1968. See also P. G. Macarthy, ‘Labour and the Living Wage, 1890-1910’. Australian Journal ofPolitics and History, Vol. 13, 1967; P. G. Macarthy, ‘Wage Determination in New South Wales 1890-1921’. Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 10, 1968; P. G. Macarthy, ‘Employers, the Tariff and Legal Wage Determination in Australia 1890-1910’. Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 12, 1970; P. G. Macarthy, ‘Living Wage in Australia: The Role of Government’, Labour History, No. 18, May 1970 and P. G. Macarthy, ‘Wages For Unskilled Work and Margins for Skilled Australia, 1901- 1921’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 12, September 1972. 29. J. Rickard, H . B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, Sydney 1984, pp. 172-4.

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definition.” Even in his book on his work, A New Province for Law and Order, he did not even allude to the origins of the idea.3’ However, it can reasonably be deduced that, because Higgins was both an admirer of the living wage of Rerum Novarum and used the same language in his 8 Novem- ber 1907 judgment, that was where he took the concept from. Higgins’ bio- grapher Rickard argued this, and he came to the conclusion that ‘one influence that Higgins did not acknowledge in the judgment was Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerurn Nov~rum’ .~* That no-one else but Leo XI11 and Catholic intellectuals disseminating the ideas of Rerum Novarum were using these words to describe the ideal minimum wage also adds substance to the claim that the living wage of Australia was inspired by the words of the Pope. It is certainly more than coincidence!

Only the Catholic Church was offering a living wage as the solution to the problem of finding a better way to set wages than letting capital and labour use their industrial might to battle it out to decide. In his May 1891 Encyc- lical On the Condition of Labour, Rerurn Novarum, Leo XI11 proposed that the problem of strikes could be solved by having society return to the Catho- lic ethics of medieval times. The Pope advocated a living wage when he said that ‘there is a dictate of Nature more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, that the remuneration must be enough to support the wage-earner in reasonable and frugal c~mfor t ’?~ He blamed the poverty- stricken state of nineteenth-century workmen on the Reformation’s usurping of an economy regulated by the Catholic Church. Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church had ensured ‘just’ wages and prices through its influence over the state, the ecclesiastical courts, and the guilds:

The ancient workmen’s Guilds were destroyed in the last century and no other organisation took their place. Public institutions have repudiated the ancient reli- gion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that workingmen have been given over, isolated and left defenceless, to the callousness of employers and the greed of unrestrained ~ornpetition.~~

Reviving the idea that the ethics of the Church should assist the state in regulating labour conditions, the Pope argued that in disputes between the employee and the employer on wages and profits, ‘the state should intervene to see that each obtains his own’.35

In Rerum Novarum the remnants of Aquinas’ dictums on the pursuit of material gain and his instructions to follow the ‘contemplative life’ can still be seen. Work was not regarded as an end in itself. Leisure time for the higher ideals was just as important as work. ‘Religion,’ Pope Leo XI11 pro- fessed, ‘teaches that as among the workmen’s concerns are Religion, herself

30. 2274 1 NA 1980 1156, Australian Archives, Sydney. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Application of H. V. McKay for an Order Under Excise Tariff Act (Harvester Case), C

H. B. Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order, London 1922. Rickard, H. B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge, p. 173. Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Lerter: Condition of Labour, Melbourne 1931, pp. 28-9. Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, p. 28. Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter, p. 13.

LIVXNG WAGE I N AUSTRALIA 99

and things spiritual and mental, the employer is bound to see that he has time for the duties of piety.’36 Labour was regarded by the Church as not important for its own sake, but as a necessary part of life:

man’s labour is necessary, for without the results of labour man cannot live; and self conservation is a law of Nature which it is wrong to disobey. . . The preser- vation of life is the bounden duty of each and all, and to fail therein is a crime. It follows that each one has a right to procure what is required in order to live, and the poor can procure it in no other way than by work and wages.31

Thus Leo XIII, as well as reiterating the living wage, was also resurrecting some of the ideas of Aquinas on the function of work and wealth. In his encyclical letter he had said that

God had not created us for the perishable and transitory things of the earth, but for the things heavenly and everlasting. . . Money and other things, which men call good and desirable, we may have.. . in abundance or we may want them alto- gether: as far as eternal happiness is concerned it is no matter; the only thing that is important is to use them right.38

Although the ethics advocated by Leo XI11 were similar to, and alluded to, Aquinas’ teachings, there was a significant difference between the living wage of Aquinas and that advanced in Rerum Novarum. Leo XIII and Catho- lics of the late nineteenth century saw it as a minimum wage, whereas Aquinas and the Catholic clerics of medieval times had seen it as a maximum wage. While Leo XI11 merely urged Catholics to refrain from being obsessed with material wealth, Aquinas had declared earning more than one needed to be a sin. The process of secularizing the living wage from the Catholic doctrines of Aquinas and the medieval clerics thus begins with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. In order to make it acceptable as a solution to the labour problem, the Catholic living wage now had to be a minimum wage, not a maximum wage.

Such was the commitment of the Papacy to the living wage that in 1931 Pope Pius XI again voiced the Catholic Church’s support for the idea that ‘the wage paid to the workingman must be sufficient for the support of himself and his fa mil^'.^' Pius XI dismissed the idea that the worker was entitled to the full results of his labour. He rejected as ‘entirely false’ the ideology where ‘the right of the full product of his toil is claimed for the wage earner’.40 The precepts of Aquinas on the desirability of acquiring only enough money for an individual’s needs were alluded to in Pius XI’S state- ments. The Pope expounded the principle that the individual should fulfil his ‘grave obligations of charity beneficence and liberality’ with ‘that portion of his income which he does not need in order to live as becomes his station’!’

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Leo XIII, p. 28. Leo XIII, p. 28. Leo XIII, p. 14. Pope Pius XI, Reconstructing the Social Order: Encyclical Letter, Melbourne 1931, p. 19. Pius XI, Reconstructing the Social Order, p. 18. Pius XI, Reconstructing the Social Order, p. 14.

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Immediately after the publication of Leo XIII’s encyclical, Australia’s Catholic Church embraced his restatement of the living wage, and affirmed its faith in some of the medieval ideas associated with the concept. The Sydney Catholic Freeman’s Journal, when referring to the Pope’s declaration of a living wage, commented in July 1891 that ‘if only this latter truth, on which the policy of the Church for the last thirteen centuries has been based had been recognised what a different appearance would our civilisation now pre~ent’.~’ This editorial noted the similarity between the trade unions of the late nineteenth century and the medieval guilds:

The ancient guilds were nothing but trade unions which the Church fostered in order that the workmen might by combination be able to contract on equal terms with their employers. As she was in the middle ages so is she now. . . she asserts the rights of unions, and she imposes upon the State the duty of protesting the right of legitimate associations among citizens and to guard against all interference with the organisations and the internal order of life of earth.“3

In August 1891 Cardinal Moran, the head of the Catholic Church in Aus- tralia, repeated this wish for there to be modem equivalents of the guilds. ‘The present labour organisations,’ said Cardinal Moran, ‘are really only the old Catholic guilds under another name.’44 The remarks of the editor of the Freeman’s Journal and Cardinal Moran were indications of the Catholic Church’s desire to revive the institutions associated with work in medieval life.

Just as Cardinal Moran repeated Leo XIII’s endorsement of the medieval regulation of work by the guilds, so too did Moran reiterate the Pope’s call for a retum to the living wage. During August 1891, in a public lecture called ‘The Rights and Duties of Labour’, Moran followed up the Labour encyclical by echoing Leo XIII’s call for a living wage:

it must be borne in mind that the labourer’s wages should suffice not only to maintain his strength and vigour, and to make provision for the rainy days, sick- ness, and old age, but should yield a competence, moreover, for the frugal support of his wife and family, and enable him to educate his children in the paths of virtue and industry and equip them for their career in life.“

The notes that Moran made for this speech in his personal papers demonstrate that he was looking at the living wage of Catholicism as the solution to the problem of setting what he called ‘fair’ and ‘right’ wages in disputes between employers and wage-earners.&

Even before Rerum Novarum, Cardinal Moran was conscious of the tradition of ‘just’ wages in Catholic social thought, and believed that a living wage would be the correct solution to labour disputes over wages. During the strikes of

42. 43. ‘The Encyclical’. 44. August 1891. 45. 46. Papen, M 203, Sydney Catholic Archdiocesan Archives, St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney.

‘The Encyclical’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 July 1891.

‘The Rights and Duties of Labour: Lecture by Cardinal Moran’, Freeman’s Journal, 22

‘The Rights and Duties of Labour’. Notes on Labour, Preparation for the Rights and Duties of Labour 1891, in Cardinal Moran

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1890 he maintained that the ethics of the Catholic Church had established for the worker ‘a right not merely to daily pay sufficient to sustain life, but to a recognition and a reward which embraced the peace and comforts of a decent home’.47 For Moran, the Catholic Church upheld the principle that

just as the poor man was entitled to share with the rich man in the enjoyment of the pure air and the bright sky, so he is entitled to comfort in his home and to the opportunities convenient for procuring education, morality and religious training for his

In his speech on ‘The Rights and Duties of Labour’ Moran espoused ideas on work similar to those that Aquinas had preached in the thirteenth century. He asserted that work was only a part of life, and that one’s leisure time could be more important than work. Not work but leisure for the contempla- tion of religion and the execution of its duties was seen as the crucial goal of life. The living wage and the eight hour day, according to Moran, were the means to bring about more leisure. Work was not the purpose of living:

Man is not a mere beast of burden, nor is it the sole purpose of his life to get through all the material work which his physical strength can accomplish. Religion and domestic duties await him, and these, if he be true to the dignity of nature, he must faithfully di~charge.4~

Moran added that ‘nothing could be more conformable to these principles than the eight hours system’.50

Under the leadership of Cardinal Moran the Catholic Church in Australia embraced the idea of a living wage. During the 1890s the Catholic news- papers - the Freeman’s Journal and the Catholic Press in Sydney and the Advocate in Melbourne - consistently urged the living wage as the solution to what was referred to as the ‘labour q~estion’.~’ Abhorring the extremes of wealth and poverty created by laissez-faire capitalism, these journals desired the regulation of work and its rewards through the creation of a living wage upheld by the state.52

Conscious that the living wage was part of traditional Catholic social eth- ics, Australian Catholic journals had espoused it as the solution of the labour problem prior to publication of Rerum Novarum. In September 1889 the Melbourne Catholic journal the Advocate had criticized the existing wages of some trades that were recently involved in industrial disputes, because they were ‘far below what would decently support the labourer himself, not to speak of a wife and a family’.53 The Advocate had asserted again in January

47. November 1890. 48. ‘The Great Australian Strike’. 49. August 1891.

‘The Great Australian Strike: His Eminence on the Settlement’, Freeman’s Journal, 1

‘The Rights and Duties of Labour: Lecture by Cardinal Moran’, Freeman’s Journal, 22

50.= ‘The Rights and Duties of Labour’. 51. For example, see ‘The Encyclical’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 July 1891; ‘Prospenty and Sweating’, Advocate (Melbourne), 2 September 1893; and ‘Our Holy Father Leo XIII: Man of the Cenkry’, Carholic Press, 14 December 1901. 52. 53.

‘Commendable Resolution’, Advocare (Melbourne), 15 April 1893. ‘The Strike in Another Aspect’, Advocate (Melbourne), 14 September 1889.

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1890 that the worker had ‘a natural right to remuneration that will enable him to live decently and rear his family in that ~ondition’.’~ Months before the Pope delivered his encyclical, the Melbourne Advocate printed a lecture by the German theologian Father Lebmkuhl which said that a wage should make ‘it possible for the workmen to support themselves and their fa mi lie^'.'^ Supporting a living wage, Lebmkuhl concluded that ‘as a general rule the worker has a right to this much pay; he also has a right not to be forced to do an excessive amount of work, or compelled to labour on Sundays and holidays’.56

The living wage was repeatedly affirmed as a natural right. Even the un- employed were entitled to a living wage. ‘The Government,’ the Melbourne Advocate asserted in April 1893, ‘should, at least supply a bare subsistence to those in need of it who cannot earn it and have no other means of obtaining it.’57 In a December 1901 editorial, the Sydney Catholic journal the Catholic Press claimed that every wage-earner, as a natural right, was entitled to adequate leisure and a living wage: the worker ‘demands as a natural right, reasonable hours of labour, the Sunday’s rest’ and ‘a wage which will enable the worker to rear his family in reasonable comfort and provide against old age and sickness’.58 The Catholic Press was repeating the very words that Cardinal Moran had used in his August 1891 ‘Lecture on the Rights and Duties of Labour’.

Why Australia adopted a medieval-like living wage as the solution to finding a wage system that would ensure industrial peace could be explained by the influence of Catholic social doctrine on Australian life. The impact of Australia’s Catholic population can be compared to the influence that Germa- ny’s Catholics (about 36 per cent of Germans were Catholics) had on the German state’s early acceptance of progressive social policies. In Germany the Catholic Bishop Von Kettler of Maim and the German Catholic Centre Party successfully impressed upon Bismarck reforms which included insur- ance against sickness (1883), against accidents (1885), and against old age (1 886). Australia’s large Catholic population (about 25 per cent during the 1890s) suggests that Catholic social doctrine may have played a similar role. In his book Australia: The Catholic Chapter, which was first published in 1946, James Murtagh claimed that Catholicism’s ethics had fulfilled this same function in helping shape the social and labour policies of Australia.59 In looking at the secularization of Catholic doctrine in Australia, it seems valuable to use the acceptance of the living wage in Australia as a case study.

While there was no Catholic political party in Australia to implement the living wage, the Catholic doctrine of the living wage featured prominently in the reforms advocated by the progressive liberals of the 1890s and the first

54. ‘Capital and Labour, Profits and Wages’, Advocate (Melbourne), 4 January 1890. 55. ‘A Moral Theologian on Strikes’, Advocate (Melbourne), 2 May 1891. 56. ‘A Moral Theologian on Strikes’. 57. ‘A Commendable Resolution’, Advocate (Melbourne), 15 April 1893. 58. ‘Our Holy Father Leo XIn: The Man of the Century’, Catholic Press, 14 December 1901. 59. J. A. Murtagh, Australia: The Catholic Chapter, Sydney 1946.

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decade of the twentieth century. The major figures in establishing the living wage in Australia were either Catholics implementing the encyclical of Pope Leo XI11 or humanists solving the social problems of capitalism by adopting a solution from human history.

The living wage was first established in Australia by a Catholic social reformer, E. W. O’Sullivan, a New South Wales Public Works Minister (1899-1904). In July 1900 O’Sullivan declared what he described as a ‘living wage’ for workers on state government contractsM Like Higgins’ living wage of the 1907 Harvester Judgment, it was seven shillings a day. ‘The men who work for us and their wives and children shall be provided for,’ O’Sullivan proclaimed in parliament, ‘even if the Government have [sic] to make a new departure in what may be called state socialism.’6’ Although some Australian state governments, wages boards, and unions had attempted to set minimum wages before O’Sullivan, these minimum wages were ‘dependent on the labour market’, and were calculated on the productive capacity of the average worker.62

That the government to which O’Sullivan belonged - the Lyne Ministry - should embrace a piece of Catholic social thought is not surprising given that it was widely seen at the time to be influenced by Catholic interests. In his 1966 book, Cardinal Moran and the A.L.P., Patrick Ford noted that the Lyne Ministry was strongly supported by the Irish Catholic community. In March 1900 the government had declared St Patrick’s day a holiday. To illustrate this point, Ford quoted one of the members of the Lyne Government as remarking that ‘we are regarded as a Catholic ministry’.63

The origins of O’Sullivan’s living wage lay with the principles that he had absorbed as a fervent Catholic layman who believed in the Church’s ethics on social issues. O’Sullivan’s biographer Bruce Mansfield has described how Rerum Novarum had been an important influence on O’Sullivan’s ideas on social and labour policy. Mansfield remarked that O’Sullivan ‘was not un- touched by the Catholic social thought of Leo XIII’s pontificate’.@ In this 1965 biography Mansfield concluded that ‘O’Sullivan was influenced by the Catholic social movement of the late 19th century’?’ Before he became a government minister O’Sullivan was the editor of the Catholic newspaper the Freeman’s Journal (1896-9), and had been President of the Sydney Trades and Labor Council in 1883. ‘In his editorials in the Freeman’s Journal (1896- 9),’ wrote Mansfield, ‘the Catholic strand in his social thought appears clearly.

O’Sullivan, as editor of the Freeman’s Journal, argued that ‘the iabour

60. O’Sullivan, New South Wales Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 103, 12 July 1900, p. 918. 61. O’Sullivan, Parliamentary Debates, p. 921. 62. See M. T. Rankin, Arbitration and Conciliation in Australasia, London 1916, pp. 19, 75; and see Young, New South Wales Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 73, 17 October 1894, p. 1406. 63. P. Ford, Cardinal Muran and the A.L.P., Melboume 1966, p. 239. 64. B. Mansfield, Australian Democrat: The Career of Edward William O’Sullivan 1846-1 910, Sydney 1965, p. 278, and see pp. 237-40. 65. Mansfield, Australian Democrat, p. 231. 66. Mansfield, p. 237.

104 J O U R N A L OF R E L I G I O U S HISTORY

troubles of the world were due to the overthrow of the ancient craft guilds by the Ref~rmation’.~~ He saw the Catholic guilds of medieval times as uphold- ing just wages. However, O’Sullivan agreed with the economic historian Thorold Rogers’ assessment of the Statute of Labourers Act (in Rogers’ book Six Centuries of Work and Wages), that it was designed to keep wages low.68 For O’Sullivan, the living wage was ‘just’ only if it was a minimum, not a maximum. Hence, he was secularizing the living wage of medieval times by removing the idea that a moderate existence was enough, and that the desire for more wealth was sinful.

In his capacity as a state minister, O’Sullivan told a public meeting of Catholic clergy and laity in Sydney in August 1901 that his inspiration for declaring the living wage had been drawn from the seven shillings a day living wage that Cardinal Moran had been paying workmen at St Mary’s Cathedral in S~dney.6~ As a well-read and devout Catholic layman, he was well aware that in declaring a living wage he had as precedents the medieval Statute of Apprentices of 1349 and the Stuart minimum wage of James I in 1604. In the articles he wrote for the newspapers and journals, and drafts of these in his personal papers, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that O’Sullivan used these historical antecedents as reference points for the living wage that he had himself declared in 1900.’O In these articles which he had written for publication, and which he felt significant enough to deposit in his personal papers, it is clear that O’Sullivan viewed the English Reformation initiated by Henry VIII as being the beginning of the decline of the good conditions that labourers had enjoyed under a medieval system based on the ethics of the Catholic Chur~h.’~

Although O’Sullivan was the first to introduce what was called a living wage, it was neither widespread nor permanent. He had the power to fix the wages of employees on public works contracts only, and this was only as long as he was a state minister. To gain permanency, the living wage had to be enshrined in the wage-fixing system of Australia - the industrial tribunals that had been set up in the wake of the great strikes of the 1890s. They were to effectively decide the level of wages through their powers to settle strikes by creating a legally binding judgment on both sides.

The living wage was first applied to an arbitration court’s wage-fixing methods by the President of the New South Wales Arbitration Court, Judge Charles Heydon, a devout Catholic, on 28 July 1905. The ‘living wage-limit’ was defined by Heydon as meaning a wage by which ‘every worker, however humble, shall receive enough to enable him to lead a human life, to marry

67. ‘The Overthrow of the Guilds’, Freeman’s Journal, 26 August 1899, p. 15; and see Mansfield, Australian Democrat, pp. 243-4. 68. ‘The Overthrow of the Guilds’; and see ‘Catholic Benefit Societies’, Freeman’s Journal, 7 May 1898; and ‘Triumph of Labour’, Freeman’s Journal, 8 October 1898. 69. ‘The Cardinal and the Crown Minister at St Benedicts’, Catholic Press, 17 August 1901. 70. E. W. O’Sullivan, ‘The Eight Hours System’, Newcusrle Weekly Mail, 17 October 1903, p. 13; and E. W. O’Sullivan Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 71. ‘The Apotheosis of Labour: The Eight Hours Celebrated by E. W. O’Sullivan’, in E. W. O’Sullivan Papers, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

L I V I N G W A G E IN A U S T R A L I A 105

and bring up a family, and maintain them and himself with, at any rate, some small degree of comf~rt’.’~ In contrast to Cardinal Moran’s, O’Sullivan’s, and Higgins’ seven shillings a day living wage, Heydon set the living wage at six shillings a day.

Judge Heydon was a practising Catholic who was very interested in social reform, to the extent that he gave lectures on progressive social policies at the Australasian Catholic Congre~ses .~~ He was closely associated with the Free- man’s Journal, and his ties with this organ of Catholic social thought re- mained strong throughout his career. Heydon, who occasionally did some ‘presswork’ for the Freeman’s Journal, had been the son of J. K. Heydon, an early editor, publisher, and printer of the Freeman’s J~urnal.’~ It is likely that being involved in publishing a journal that had consistently advocated a living wage as the solution to labour disputes had impressed upon Heydon the desirability of applying the concept to wage fixing.

The Catholic values of Judge Heydon, not the demands of the unions, were the basis of the living wage that he announced in 1905. By declaring a living wage as a basis for the state to fix wages, Heydon was setting a precedent that neither the employers nor the trade unions had wanted.75 The transcript of the case reveals that the trade unions desired a minimum wage based on the productive ‘capacity of a fair average man’.:

Heydon was not declaring, as Higgins later would, that the wage-earner had a sacrosanct right to receive a living wage regardless of how profitable industry was. In setting wages, Heydon was guided by other considerations as well as the needs of the wage-eamer. In his 1905 judgment Heydon estab- lished three considerations in setting wages, only one of which was what he referred to as the living wage. The second was what he called the ‘real price of labour’, to be gained by the Court’s keeping ‘the law of supply and de- mand carefully in view’. The third was ‘the degree of prosperity existing in the industry’.’’

In his biography of Higgins, Rickard ‘mentioned Heydon’s judgment of 1905 and he compared it to Higgins’ 1907 Harvester Judgment. He observed that Heydon was a Catholic ‘and might be expected to have been similarly influenced by Rerum Novarum, but unlike Higgins’, he ‘did not carry through its logic’.’’ This is a fair assessment of Heydon’s 1905 judgment, which

72. New South Wales Sawmill and Timber-Yard Employees’ Association v . The Sydney and Suburban Timber Merchants’ Association. Industrial Arbitration Reports of New South Wales, Vol. 4, 1905, p. 309. 73. Third Australasian Catholic Congress, Sydney 1909. 74. See P. Heydon, ‘Heydon, Jabez’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 1 , Melbourne 1966; J. M. Bennett and M. Rutledge, ‘Heydon, Charles’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol. 9, Melbourne 1983; and ‘R. E. O’Connor’, Freeman’s Journal, 5 September 1903. 75. Beeby, New South Wales Court of Arbitration Transcripts; Sawmillers’ Case (1905). 2/5719, New South Wales Archives; and see ‘The Minimum Wage’, Worker (Sydney), 26 October 1905,

76. Beeby, Transcripts, p. 292. 77. New South Wales Sawmill and Timber-Yard Employees’ Association v. The Sydney and Suburban Timber Merchants’ Association, Industrial Arbitration Reports of New South Wales,

78. Rickard, H. B . Higgins, p. 174.

p. 4.

Vol. 4, 1905, pp. 309-10.

106 JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HlSTORY

recognized that what an industry could afford was crucial, while Higgins in his judgments ignored this consideration.

Heydon also gave no specific method for calculating what were the needs of the average family and what were the costs of their basic necessities. In his early history of the living wage in Australia, D. T. Sawkins made the point that Heydon ‘did not disclose any method which he may have used of weighing the minimum wage’.79 Sawkins wrote that i t was Higgins who, in 1907, made ‘the first pronouncement by an Australian judge in which an attempt is clearly shown to weigh a wage against needs on some stated principle’!’ In the Harvester Judgment Higgins surveyed several families of wage-earners in Melbourne to ascertain how much they spent on the neces- sities of living.

Nonetheless, Heydon’s role in establishing the living wage concept in the principles of Australian wage fixing should not be understated; nor should Heydon’s commitment to the idea of the living wage. The fact remains that he made the first attempt to apply the living wage concept to wage fixation in Australia. His interest in how best to apply this idea to Australia proved an abiding one. On 16 February 1914 he handed down what Sawkins and John Hutson viewed as the first thorough investigation of how to calculate the living wage in terms of what were the needs of the average family, and what were the costs of these needs.’’ Hutson described Heydon’s inquiry as ‘a much more thorough and detailed inquiry than that of Judge Higgins in the Harvester Case’.’’

In the findings of his inquiry on the living wage Heydon now endorsed the idea that if an industry could not afford to pay the living wage it should not be in business (which was not his approach in 1905). Hutson made much of this change in his 1970 book, Six Wage Concepts. He quoted Heydon as clearly stating this principle:

The strict living wage must fulfil two conditions: (1) It must be such as to secure to the worker the satisfaction of his normal needs as an average worker of his class here in Australia; and (2) it must be such that any further increase would call for the extinction of the industry paying it. These two amounts must coincide and a living wage should not be less than the former and not more than the latter.*’

Sawkins compared Heydon’s 1914 inquiry with Higgins’ Harvester Judg- ment. As a Commonwealth Statistician, he was more pleased with Heydon’s exactness than with Higgins’ (Heydon had used the Commonwealth Statisti- cian’s report on 113 families while Higgins had calculated his living wage from a survey of nine fa mi lie^),'^ remarking that ‘Heydon had more materials

19. 80. Sawkins. D. 12.

D. T. Sawkins, The Living Wage in Australia, Melbourne 1933, p. 12.

81. 82. 83. Industrial Gazetfe, Vol. 4, No. I , March 1914. D. 107.

Sawkins, bp. 15-17; and Hutson, Six Wage Concepts, p. 36. Hutson, Six Wage Concepts, p. 36. Hutson, p. 36; and see ‘Inquiry re Cost of Living and Living Wage’, New South Wales

84. Melbourne 1929, pp. 199-200.

For a fuller discussion of this point see G. Anderson, Fixation of Wages in Australia,

L I V I N G WAGE I N A U S T R A L I A 107

at command, and the basis which he adopted was an improvement on Mr Justice Higgins’ impre~sionism’.~~ Sawkins noted that ‘instead of the “labour- er’s home of about five persons” he provided a realistic statistical average family of two parents and two dependent children’; and that he ‘built up his allowances for food and rent more decisively and without using the “about” and “about” of the Harvester judgment’.s6

The main conflict between Higgins’ living wage and Heydon’s was that the average family under Higgins included three children, while according to Heydon’s statistical surveys it should have been two children. Heydon set the living wage for Sydney at eight shillings a day (which was equivalent to six shillings in 1907 terms). He disputed the Harvester standard.*’ A family of four (two adults and two children) would have reduced Higgins’ 1907 forty- two shillings a week living wage to thirty-six shillings a week.88

Heydon thus made a major contribution to the development of the living wage in the Australian wage-fixing system. Yet, in Australian history Heydon’s contribution seems to have been undervalued. Perhaps this is because of two reasons. Despite Heydon’s being the first to use the concept of a living wage in wage fixing, it was Higgins who was the first to actually give economic and legal form to this wage concept through his calculations in the Harvester Judgment. Also, Heydon’s thorough examination of the living wage in 1914, although demonstrating his continuing interest in the concept of the living wage, was sidelined because the state tribunals, over decades, gradually fol- lowed the principles of the Federal Arbitration Court. Thus Higgins’ Ha- vester Judgment appears to stand as a lone milestone in Australian history, despite it being part of a process of secularization of a Catholic concept - a process in which other individuals played their part. This sequence of events included the contributions of Pope Leo XI11 and Cardinal Moran in reviving the concept, and the Catholic social reformers O’Sullivan and Heydon in attempting to apply it.

The problem of calculating a living wage in pounds and pence proved a perplexing one. In the Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Court the devout Catholic Judge R. E. O’Connor was moving towards establishing a living wage during his brief term as its first President. But how it should be calcu- lated remained uncertain for O’Connor.

In 1906 O’Connor advocated adjusting wages to the cost of living. O’Connor argued that, in setting wages, an amount

must also be added for the increased cost of living in Australia, not only by reason of the higher cost of life’s necessaries, but also by reason of the increased comfort of living and the higher standard of social conditions which the general sense of the community in Australia allows those who live by labour.@

85. 86. Sawkins, p. 17. 87. Sawkins, p. 17. 88. 89. p. 27.

Sawkins, The Living Wage in Australia, p. 17.

G. Anderson, Fixation of Wages in Australia, Melbourne 1929, p. 136. Merchant Service Guild v. Commonwealth Steamship Owners’ Association, 1 CAR (1906),

108 J O U R N A L OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY

In his 1906 Merchant Service Guild v. Commonwealth Steamship Owners’ Association judgment, O’Connor, by endorsing the idea of adjusting wages to the cost of living, was taking a step towards declaring a wage based on the cost of living of the average family - a living wage. During his brief term as President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court O’Connor expressed his wish to establish a living wage, but he did not see how he could.90 Consequently, he settled on the idea that ‘market value must always be the most important element’ in fixing wages.”

There is strong evidence to support the proposition that O’Connor desired to set a living wage, but was perplexed at how to do so. Rickard’s very brief assessment of O’Connor’s judgment was the same as his appraisal of Heydon’s 1905 judgment: O’Connor was a Catholic ‘and might be expected to have been similarly influenced by Rerum Novarum’ but, unlike Higgins, he ‘did not cany through its logic’.92 While this is correct, O’Connor’s relationship with the idea of the living wage goes beyond this statement. M. B. Hammond, a contemporary observer of O’Connor’s 1906 Merchant Service Guild v. Commonwealth Steamship Owners’ Association judgment, made some perti- nent remarks on O’Connor’s intentions on founding a living wage. In an article in the American Economic Review in 1913, Hammond concluded that O’Connor

did not reject the idea of ‘the living wage’ as a principle for determining the minimum wages to be paid but that, since he was dealing only with a class of labourers well above the minimum, he did not find the living wage a practicable measure for fixing the wages in di~pute.’~

O’Connor’s desire to declare a living wage was probably influenced by ideas that he had absorbed from his Catholic background. Like Heydon, O’Connor had done a considerable amount of ‘presswork’ for the Freeman’s Journal.94 He had attended Cardinal Moran’s ‘Lecture on the Rights and Duties of Labour’ in 1891, in which Moran had advocated a living wage?5 In May 1899 he was one of the inaugural vice-presidents of the Catholic Young Men’s S~ciety.’~ O’Connor was later one of the four lay presidents of the Third Australasian Catholic Congress held in Sydney from 26 September to 3 October 1909. Part of the official agenda of this conference was a paper given by P. S. Cleary publicly reaffirming that the living and minimum wages of Australian industrial courts were within the Catholic Church’s medieval traditions?’

O’Connor’s successor as President of the Federal Arbitration Court, H. B.

90. 1 CAR (1909). p. 25. 91. 1 CAR (1909), p. 25. 92. Rickard, H. B . Higgins, p. 174. 93. M. B. Hammond, ‘Judicial Interpretation of the Minimum Wage in Australia’, American Economic Review, Vol. 3 , No. 2, p. 267. 94. ‘R. E. O’Connor’, Freeman’s Journal, 5 September 1903. 95. ‘Rights and Duties of Labour: Address by Cardinal Moran’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 August 1891. 96. Ford, Cardinal Moran and the A.L.P., p. 238. 97. Cleary, ‘The Church and the Worker’, Third Australasian Catholic Congress, pp. 255-69.

L I V I N G WAGE I N A U S T R A L I A 109

Higgins, though not a Catholic, was familiar with Catholic social thought. As a humanist, Higgins sought to resolve the problem of work and its remunera- tion by taking from human history the pre-capitalist notion of a living wage. Higgins’ biographer John Rickard was the first to bring to light a lecture that Higgins gave during 1896, expressing his admiration of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum N o v ~ r u m . ~ ~ Higgins called the encyclical ‘Another Isthmus in His- tory’. By refemng to it as an isthmus in history Higgins was giving consid- erable praise, indeed, to Rerum Novurum. He remarked that ‘there is nothing in recent history so striking or significant as the Pope’s encyclical of 189 1 ’y9 Higgins interpreted the encyclical as meaning that the ‘employer should give fair wages for a fair day’s work’.loo

In his 1896 lecture Higgins quoted the very words of Rerum Novurum that outlined the living wage: ‘remuneration must be sufficient “to support the wage-earner in reasonable and frugal comfort” ’.lo’ This speech demonstrates that, as early as the 1890s, Higgins saw the living wage as the method to replace the regulation of wages by the free-market laws of luissez-fuire capi- talism. In 1902 he had written an article on the desirability of finding a new basis for wage setting, an article which appeared in a prominent journal of Catholic social thought, Austral Light.lo2 This would seem to confirm Rickard’s conclusion that ‘one influence that Higgins did not acknowledge in the judg- ment was Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Nov~rum’.’’~

Higgins remained in contact with Catholic social doctrines. His corre- spondence files provide evidence from which to conclude that he was familiar with Cardinal Moran’s social thought. From the letters in Higgins’ private papers, it is clear that he regularly corresponded with Moran, and debated the meaning of the Gospels. ‘04 Perhaps it is no coincidence that Higgins’ living wage was the same seven shillings that Cardinal Moran and the Catholic social reformer O’Sullivan had declared as a living wage. Higgins’ declara- tion of a living wage in 1907, despite being separated from Moran’s 1891 lecture on the ‘Rights and Duties of Labour’ by many years, used parallel phrases to express the same idea. In his 1891 lecture Moran had defined a living wage as one that made provision for the ‘frugal support’ of the wage- earner, his wife, and family. Higgins in 1907 said that his living wage would ensure the ‘frugal comfort’ of the wage-earner, his wife and family. Moran said that such a wage should allow the wage-earner to ‘make provision for rainy days’. Higgins echoed this when he said that his living wage was intended to allow the wage-earner to make ‘provision for evil days’.’”

At the time of Higgins’ Harvester Judgment, acknowledgment of the long

98. 99. 100.

Rickard, H . B. Higgins, p. 78. H. B. Higgins, Another Isthmus in History, Creswick 1896, p. 16. Hieeins. Another Isthmus. 0. 17. , .

101. Higgins; p. 17. 102. H. B. Higgins, ‘Australian Ideals’, Austral Light, 1 January 1902. 103. Rickard, H . B . Higgins, p. 173. 104. See Higgins’ Correspondence, Ms 1057, National Library of Australia, Canberra. 105. ‘The Rights and Duties of Labour: Lecture by Cardinal Moran’: and ‘Harvester Judgment

110 J O U R N A L O F RELIGIOUS HISTORY

history of the living wage was widespread. Authors of Higgins’ time ac- cepted that the living wage had a long intellectual tradition, which stretched back to Aquinas.lW J. A. Ryan, an American Catholic social thinker, writing a year before Higgins’ 1907 judgment, lauded the medieval times, when Catholic ‘theologians and canonists taught that a just price should be paid for every commodity’, and ‘they virtually insisted that the labourer should be paid just wages’.’07

Higgins’ private papers and judgments reveal that he was conscious of public awareness of the tradition of the living wage. In his later writings, Higgins indicated his agreement with the living wage of the most Catholic of the Anglican theologians of the Elizabethan Age, Richard Hooker. In his personal papers, he approvingly quoted a brief passage from Hooker’s Eccle- siastical Polity, which had been part of a British government report on estab- lishing the minimum wage in British industry:

the first impediment which naturally we endeavour to remove is penury and want of things without which we cannot live. It is because these primary human wants must be recognised that, as you must have noticed, the British Government, through its Commonwealth, is establishing a minimum wage in one industry after another.lo8

In a 1911 judgment Higgins expressed his consciousness of applying a medieval and Tudor concept to solve a modem problem. At the same time he was aware that his living wage had a different purpose:

The power of the employer to withhold bread is a much more effective weapon than the power of the employee to refuse labour. Freedom of contract, under such cir- cumstances, is surely misnamed; it should rather be called despotism in contract and this Court is empowered to a fix a minimum wage as a check on despotic power. The fact that the Court is not also empowered to fix maximum wages (as under Elizabethan laws) is a recognition of the difference in the position of con- tracting par tie^.'^'

Higgins secularized the living wage by removing from it the idea that the accumulation of money was sinful; but he kept the idea that the individual wage-earner had a natural right to earn a wage that would sustain himself, his wife and family in frugal comfort. In his judgments and private papers, there is strong evidence for concluding that Higgins was conscious of where he had obtained the idea of the living wage from: the medieval doctrine of the Catholic Church. For Higgins, as he wrote in his book, A New Province for Law and Order, the living wage was a way to uplift the worker from material deprivation:

Men accept the doom, the blessing of work: they do not dispute the necessity of the struggle with Nature for existence. They are willing enough to work, but even good work does not necessarily ensure proper human subsistence, and when they protest against the condition of things they are told their aims are too ‘materialistic’. Give

106. 107. 108. 109.

P. Snowden, The Living Wage, London 1912, pp. 6-7. J . A. Ryan, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects, London 1906, p. 28. Typed script c. 1914, Higgins Papers, Ms 2525, National Library of Australia. Federated Engine Drivers’ Case, 5 CAR (1911), p. 27.

LIVING WAGE I N AUSTRALIA 111

them relief from their materialistic anxiety, give them reasonable certainty that their material needs will be met by honest work, and you release infinite stores of human energy for higher efforts, and nobler ideals."'

Interestingly, Aquinas had advocated a similar principle when he said that the contemplative life was superior to the life of business, and that we should labour only to satisfy our needs so that we could pursue nobler ideals in our leisure. Higgins likewise saw himself as providing the wage-earner with a basic standard of living and giving him time to have leisure. Higgins declared that his role as an arbitrator between trade unions and employers was to ensure that an 'employee shall have a reasonable return for his labour - above all, sufficient means to meet the primary needs of life - including opportunities for rest and recreation'."'

When the living wage was applied in medieval times it was used by the state to keep wages down during the periods of labour shortage, such as the time of the Black Death. In contrast, Higgins saw the living wage as the starting point from which the employer could offer the employee more. This idea was very different from the living wage of medieval times. He argued that 'the living wage must be kept as sacrosanct - beyond the reach of bargaining - but when the skilled worker has been secured a living wage, bargaining may with caution be allowed'."* Higgins made it clear to both employers and employees that he was not setting a maximum wage above which the wage-earner should not ask for more:

My task is confined to determining the minimum wage for the man of average capacity. If super skill be looked for, the superman may be tempted by super payment. The scheme is not that all should be paid alike - not a dead level of equality in payment as ignorant people suppose; but a minimum wage which the employer is not to go be10w.l'~

The origins of the living wage in Australia are to be found in the ideas of the Catholic social reformers, Cardinal Moran, O'Sullivan and Heydon, and the radical liberal humanist, Higgins, not the trade unions of the 1890s. The trade union movement was more interested in making sure that wage-eamers could share in the profits of industry; and this did not entail a living wage. This perspective is supported by the work of P. G. Macarthy. In his study of the Harvester Judgment, Macarthy concluded that the living wage did not come about through the trade union movement and the Labor Party cam- paigning for it, because they did not.'14

Trade unions had settled for a minimum wage, but the minimum wage they had wanted was based on the productive capacity of the average worker.

110. Higgins, A New Province for Law and Order, pp. 37-8. 1 1 1 . The Merchant Guild of Australia v . the Commonwealth Steamship Owners Association, 4 CAR (1910), p. 101. 112. The Barrier Branch of the Amalgamated Miners' Association of Broken Hill v . The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, 8 CAR (1909), p. 32. 113. Marine Cooks' Case, 2 CAR (1908). p. 67. 114. P. G. Macarthy, 'Labour and the Living Wage, 1890-1910'; P. G. Macarthy, 'Victorian Wages Boards: Their Origin and the Doctrine of the Living Wage'; and P. G. Macarthy, 'Living Wage in Australia: The Role of Government'.

112 J O U R N A L O F RELIGIOUS HISTORY

Trade union reaction to the declaration of a living wage by Judge Heydon in 1905 was unenthusiastic: the Sydney Trades and Labor Council passed a resolution which did not endorse the principles established by Heydon, but affirmed the traditional union cry: ‘that the council believes in a minimum wage and that fixing of such be left to the trade union^'."^ George S. Beeby, the trade union representative at the hearing which established the living wage in New South Wales, believed the ‘correct principle in fixing minimum wages’ was ‘according to the average capacity of the average wage-earner’.”6 In the transcript of Heydon’s living wage case, Beeby argued that the mini- mum wage should be set according to the productive capacity of the average worker: ‘Here is my contention briefly on that point that the fair way of setting the minimum wage and one which this Court has always acted, is that the minimum should be fixed on the capacity of a fair average man.’Il7

Two years after Beeby’s protest, when Higgins declared that there should be a living wage in the Federal Arbitration Court, the trade union move- ment’s attitude had not changed. Rickard noted in his biography that the representative of the trade unions had to be ‘coaxed’ by Higgins into accept- ing the concept of the living wage.”’ The representative of the employees, Duffy, did not initially advocate the living wage as the method of remunera- tion for the wage-earner that the union movement wanted. The transcript of the Harvester Judgment reveals that Duffy and the unions were asking for a larger slice of the profits of industry:

It is not merely fair wages. In the ordinary sense of the word it is not a living wage . . . The investigation is one looking into the amount of profits obtained . . . that the amount of money made out of the article is fairly divided between the employer and the employee. . . We are entitled to get some share of the extra profit being made. ‘ l9

Nevertheless, the union movement gratefully accepted the living wage, not because it believed in the principles behind it, but because the living wage was substantially higher than the wages that most trade unionists were receiv- ing. An editorial in the Sydney Worker favourably greeted the introduction of a living wage because it was well above the average wage rates.’” In general, trade unions welcomed a living wage as the minimum wage, but they hoped for more.’*’

The living wage, though derived from Catholic social thought, and orig- inating in medieval times, found new application in twentieth-century Aus- tralia as a means to determine wages in industrial disputes. The process by which it was adopted was one whereby the concept was secularized and the religious content removed to make it acceptable to the requirements of the

115. ‘A Living Wage: Still Left to the Unions’, Worker (Sydney), 2 September 1905. 116. Sawrnillers’ Case, NSW Arbitration Court Transcripts, 2/5719, p. 584. I 17. Sawrnillers’ Case, Transcripts, p. 584. 118. Rickard, H . B . Higgins, p. 172. 119. Application of H. V. McKay for an Order Under Excise Tariff Act (Harvester Case), C 2274 1 NA 1980 1156, pp. 4-5, 9, Australian Archives, Sydney. 120. ‘The Harvester Excise and Human Progress’, Worker (Sydney), 14 November 1907. 121. ‘Canuthers and the Arbitration Act’, Worker (Sydney), 2 August 1906.

4

L I V I N G W A G E I N A U S T R A L I A 113

twentieth century. The Catholic social reformers Cardinal Moran, O’Sullivan, Heydon, and O’Connor and the humanist Higgins were all engaged in this process of secularization. The idea of Aquinas and the medieval legal system of a living wage as a maximum wage were clearly untenable; but the idea of such a wage as a minimum helped solve the labour problem of the early twentieth century. Indeed, in one of his judgments on the living wage Higgins stated that he could not ‘conceive of industrial peace unless and until the employee had secured the essentials of human existence’.’22

122. New South Wales, Sydney 1913, p. xliv.

Final Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Industrial Arbitrution in the State of