LABOUR. In economics, as in ordinary discourse, the word labour is used as a name for the general body of wage-earners. It is in this sense, for example, that one speaks of "organized labour." In a more special and technical sense, however, labour means, in economics, any valuable service rendered by a human agent in the production of wealth, other than the accumulating and providing of capital or the assuming of the risks which are inseparable from the responsible planning and direction of busi ness undertakings. It includes the services of manual labourers, but it covers many other kinds of services as well. It is not syn onymous with toil or exertion, and it has only a remote relation to "work done" in the physical or physiological senses. The appli cation of the physical energies of men to the work of production is, of course, an element in labour, but skill and self-direction, within a larger or smaller sphere, are also elements. A character istic of all labour is that it uses time, in the specific sense that it consumes some part of the short days and years of human life. Another common characteristic is that, unlike play, it is not gen erally a sufficient end in itself, but is performed for the sake of its product or, in modern economic life, for the sake of a claim to a share of the aggregate product of the community's industry. Even the labourer who finds his chief pleasure in his work com monly tries to sell services or products for the best price he can get.
If labour could be measured adequately in simple homogeneous units of time, such as labour-hours, the problems of economics would be simplified. But labourers differ and tasks differ also, as, for example, in respect of the amount and character of training and the degree of skill, intelligence, capacity to direct one's own work or the work of others, and the other special aptitudes which they require. They differ, furthermore, in respect of their irk someness, the prospects which they offer for permanent employ ment and advancement, the social status generally associated with them, and in respect of other characteristics which make one task more attractive than another. Quite apart, therefore, from the circumstance that the mobility of labour is imperfect, that it can not be transferred easily and quickly to the employments in which its products have the highest value, there is the further circum stance that the wages of different kinds of labour cannot be taken to be payments for larger or smaller "quantities of labour." The
price per unit of time which a particular kind of labour commands in the market depends not only upon the technical efficiency of the labourer but upon the demand for the particular services which he is able to furnish, upon their relative scarcity, and upon the supply of other productive agents. The attempts of the older economists and of some of the Socialists to find a simple and direct relation between the value of a product and the quantity of labour which it embodies were fruitless.
Different uses of the available supply of labour, however, what ever its composition, can be compared with reference to the quantity and the value of the products which they yield, and such comparisons are being made continuously in the ordinary course of the planning and management of competitive business under takings. By means of economic analysis, moreover, it is often possible to know whether a proposed change in the organization of the community's labour or of the uses to which it is put (as, for example, by encouraging certain types of industries at the expense of others) would be more likely to increase or to de crease the annual production of wealth. For the individual worker, as well as for the community as a whole, the practicable way of measuring the "labour costs" of production is by reference to the other possible products which might have been secured by means of the same labour, or to possible alternative uses of the time given to labour. Thus the fact that in most countries both the number of hours per day and the part of the average worker's life which are given to labour are less than they were ioo years ago, means, not that labour has become intrinsically more arduous or more painful, but that it has become more costly, in the sense that, with the increase of the general level of incomes, the alter native uses of the worker's time have become relatively more valuable. (See also ECONOMICS ; WAGES.) (A. Yo.) LABOUR, HOURS OF: see HOURS OF LABOUR.