Faithful Victorian by Mark Donoghue

Author:Mark Donoghue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

There is little doubt Mill abandoned the “vulgar” or static wage fund doctrine in his Thornton article. He did not, however, abandon the doctrine per se. In both the Principles (Books IV and V) and the 1869 article, Mill retained a more flexible version of it. This modification removed an important economic argument from the arsenal of those who believed that the labouring classes were unable to raise their wages through collective bargaining. As such, it enabled Mill to attack popular anti-union slogans, which ruled out union-induced wage increases on the basis that the wage fund was fixed.

Mill’s growing antipathy towards the wage fund doctrine has been chronicled by several historians who rest their case mainly on a letter Mill wrote Henry Fawcett on 1 January 1866. In that letter, Mill expressed doubts over the validity of the wage fund doctrine as an adequate explanation of wage determination in the context of praising Fawcett’s treatment of trade unions and cooperation in the Manual of Political Economy. 23 Mill appears to realize that his own Book II version of the doctrine (i.e. the static wage fund doctrine) could be an obstacle to the social and political reforms he envisaged:I need hardly say how highly I approve your chapter on cooperation … The chapter which on the whole I least like is the one on wages, though it will be more praised than any of the rest: but I think I could shew that an increase of wages at the expense of profits would not be an impracticability on the true principles of political economy. (Mill 1972, 16: 1130)

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