Dick Bryan | Minimum Living Standards and the Working-Class Surplus: Higgins, Henderson and Housing | Labour History, 95

Minimum Living Standards and the Working-Class Surplus: Higgins, Henderson and Housing

Dick Bryan^*

In the light of growing household indebtedness in Australia and the stark experience of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States of America this article develops a parallel between the lending practices of current financial institutions, and debates around the 1907 Harvester Judgment; in particular, the different perspectives of Mr Justice Higgins and H.V. McKay on the role of minimum standards of living and the potential for wages to contribute to capital accumulation. In different ways and in different contexts, these two processes a century apart offer perspective on the determination of minimum working-class consumption and the capacity of capital to re-convert part of wages into payments to capital (a surplus). The article draws out the parallels, and how each might be used to shed new light on the other.

Of the historic benchmarks that have defined working-class living standards in Australia, two stand out. One is the Harvester Judgment of 1907¹ which led to the development of a basic wage and lasted for most of the twentieth century. The other is the Commonwealth of Australia's Commission of Inquiry into Poverty, Chaired by Professor Ronald Henderson (hereafter Henderson Inquiry), which reported in 1975.² While Ronald Henderson's analysis never entered directly into policy as did the Harvester Judgment of Mr Justice Higgins, it has remained an enduring benchmark for determining a minimum standard of living, with direct implications for (social) wages.

This article addresses what might be seen as a new benchmark, involving a re-evaluation of the first two in the light of their specific historical contexts. It relates to the way in which banks and mortgage originators determine the capacity of households to service debt. The connection here might be thought tenuous; nevertheless the point is to show some recurrent themes in the relationship between living standards, wages and capital accumulation, despite massively different historical circumstances. Specifically, today we have wages determined broadly according to the principles of market forces. Yet through the banking system, and the expectation that working-class people will engage credit, we see a de facto determination by lending institutions of basic living standards according to negotiated credit arrangements.

How does this de facto minimum arise? In simple terms, as the 'welfare state' contracts, we are in an era where all adults are now expected to accumulate capital for old age, whether it is in housing, savings, superannuation or some other form of income insurance. Surveys report consistently that people in Australia will face significant declines in living standards in retirement unless their savings rate increases,³ and government policy systematically affirms incentives for self-funded retirement rather than reliance on a state pension.⁴ In this circumstance, the question of what represents a basic standard of living returns in the determination of what part of the wage is 'required' for consumption and what part is available to accumulate and service debt. In this form, it is neither a matter for an industrial court, nor for a government policy on poverty thresholds and poverty alleviation; it is about risk management strategies in globally-integrated, profit-making financial institutions.

We have recently seen this issue play out in the United States, in the sub-prime housing market, where it is apparent that the risk management practices were ineffective in differentiating income needed for essential consumption and income available for debt servicing. It can be expected that vigilance here is tightening, so it is interesting to cast a historical perspective on the determination of the requirement of essential consumption, starting with Australia's 'original' national minimum living standard.

In developing this argument, this article explores how differing understandings of wages and working-class investment found in the Harvester Case can be seen to flow through into contemporary financial market calculation of working-class minimum levels of consumption. The article is not intended as a comprehensive analysis of debates around the Harvester Judgment and its significance, nor does it aim to present a historical analysis of working-class living standards and how those levels have been set. Its objective is a relatively simple 'dual snapshot': it is to show how a current issue, in the specialist area of bank lending and prudential regulation thereof, serves to re-create an old debate in a new guise. In the process, we can see also that the current issue can cause us to give new meanings to that old debate.

The subsequent sections begin with a distinctive issue in the Harvester Case: the role of wages in working-class accumulation. The article then turns, via a brief consideration of the Henderson poverty line, to contemporary banking practices, where that poverty line is being used to delineate basic levels of working-class consumption, in order to maximise labours' debt-servicing capacity.

The Harvester Judgment in Context

Mr Justice Higgins' Harvester Judgment had as its purpose the determination of a 'fair and reasonable' wage for workers at the Sunshine Harvester Company. This determination has been given status beyond its particular context: this was explicitly a test case to determine a generalised 'basic wage', albeit for a limited cohort of workers. Further, the Harvester Judgment has been attributed iconic status as a key plank of the so-called 'Federation Settlement' that is considered to have mediated early twentieth century social and economic divisions.⁵

The history of the case needs no substantive re-telling here, but we should note that there are particularities in this case that are often lost in the attribution of its historic meaning. Humphrey McQueen⁶ has recently reminded us of some of these particularities: that the Harvester Judgment was tied specifically to tariff policies, with implications for state revenue, and the Sunshine Harvester Company's application for exclusion from excise duties.⁷ Accordingly, the case had limited impact outside of tariff-protected manufacturing employers. McQueen also reminds us that the owner of the Sunshine Harvester Company, H.V. McKay, had a history of resistance to unions and state wages boards, instead advocating individual contract negotiations with workers.⁸ The Sunshine Harvester Company itself remained a site of sustained industrial conflict for years after the case: hardly the embodiment of a 'deal' between labour and protectionist capital, as the 'Federation Settlement' proposition suggests.

In addition to the particularities identified by McQueen, there is another: the relationship between wages, rents and capital accumulation in labour's production of a surplus for capital. It becomes apparent through a contrast of the ways in which Mr Justice Higgins and H.V. McKay understood financial relations between employer and employee.

Mr Justice Higgins determined that 'the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being in a civilised community' dictated that an unskilled labourer should be paid a minimum of seven shillings for an eight-hour day. Herein lay the basis of the 'basic wage'. In reaching this determination, Higgins sought evidence from experts, including a rental expert, and 'working men's wives' on the cost of living 'for an average labourer with normal wants, and under normal conditions'. The categories of costs he examined were rent, a range of food items, and fuel. Specifically in relation to housing, part of the seven shillings a day determination was a calculation of 'the usual rent paid by a labourer, as distinguished from an artisan'.⁹ He excluded from calculation a range of items, including many consumer durable goods, especially luxuries, and a range of payments a worker might undertake to cover an uncertain future. He explicitly excluded: life insurance, savings, payments for loss of employment, payments to accident and benefit societies, and payments for sickness and death.¹⁰

This classification of what is included in 'normal needs' and what can be excluded embodies a particular conception of wages and standards of living: the 'basic wage' had within it no expectation of working-class investment in assets, such as housing or savings, or any form of insurance; in sum, no purchase of rights to future income. Housing was treated purely via the category of rent: an item of consumption, not investment. Life after work was to be supported by state pensions, and so it was the responsibility of neither employee nor employer. Victoria and New South Wales introduced aged pensions in 1901, and the Commonwealth followed in 1909.¹¹

However, H.V. McKay had other ideas about the wage – its meaning as well as its level – and especially in relation to housing. In 1904 he moved his highly successful harvester operations from Ballarat and other regional cities of Victoria to a very spacious site at Braybrook Junction, later called the suburb of Sunshine. The location offered good transport connections and, being in a shire rather than within the City of Melbourne, it was not automatically subject to determinations of a state wages board. But as well as these advantages, Braybrook Junction provided McKay with sufficient land to develop housing for his workers. His plan here was initially speculative – he is reported to have contended that as land values rose 'we can sell it by the foot instead of by the acre'.¹² In 1907, he converted a 25 acre paddock opposite the factory into the Sunshine Estate and 76 large allotments were sold, generally based on loans provided by the company. By 1909, he had constructed some rental properties for his employees, especially those transferred from Ballarat.¹³

As his property development plans evolved, they transformed into something more utopian – a community of worker freeholders, free from militant unionism. He looked to England, to the Cadbury and Lever brothers' company towns, as models.¹⁴ But his initial instinct in property development indicates that McKay understood the division of wages into consumption and investment in housing, even at the bottom of the wage scale, and how it would be determined.

Hence, there was a specific issue which has been neglected in 'basic wage' generalisations about the Sunshine Harvester case and which perhaps takes on meaning only many decades later. Mr Justice Higgins was making determinations of a basic wage in terms of immediate costs of working-class living. H.V. McKay took a wider perspective on wages and capital accumulation. A brief theoretical detour will help clarify.

If we think of a 'surplus' in the Marxian tradition, it is the difference between value created by labour in production and the value of labour power, where the latter is defined in terms of the costs of reproducing a working-class family. Mr Justice Higgins was making a stark determination of the latter, with direct implications for the rate of surplus value. But at Sunshine Harvester Company, at the same time as that surplus was being appropriated from labour in the production process, H.V. McKay was also appropriating some part of wages 'in circulation' in the form of rent¹⁵ and interest payments. These were transfers of surplus that, in the Marxian tradition, are generally conceived as within the class of capital (that is, transfers between land owners, capitalists and banks in the process of inter-sectoral equalization of the rate of profit). But in the Sunshine Harvester context, McKay served to blur the distinction between 'production' and 'circulation', finding a double form of surplus appropriation from labour.

The suggestion here is not that the rental rates, land prices and interest rates charged by McKay were in some sense excessive, although any theory of ground rent – Georgist, Marxian or neo-classical – would recognise that housing for Sunshine Harvester workers immediately adjacent to the plant could well have provided the opportunity for a rental premium (a differential rent). The point is that McKay understood that, in the reproduction of labour power, to use Marx's phrase, the cost of food and the costs of rent and loan repayments for housing purchase are qualitatively different. Food is part of labour's commodity consumption. Rent and interest are part of the social surplus. By the provision of land for housing and rental properties, McKay was incorporating some part of wages back into his appropriation of surplus.

In summary, the circumstances of the Sunshine Harvester Case seem to have embodied two distinctive perspectives on housing, and investment in the future in general. Mr Justice Higgins had a focus on working-class wages for immediate consumption, and so treated housing purely as consumption (that is, he considered only rental costs) and saw investment in the future as outside basic consumption. H.V. McKay, conversely, saw working-class wages are part of capital accumulation and within the agenda of corporate profit making. Accordingly he saw wages as both a provision for current consumption and a potential source of working-class investment.¹⁶

This distinction is lost in the general significance of the determination of a basic wage. As we shall see shortly, this particularity has returned a century later as a general issue.

The Henderson Inquiry into Poverty

Professor Ronald Henderson was Director of the Applied Institute for Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne. From the mid-1960s he developed quantified estimates of poverty rates in Melbourne, and revealed a surprising level of poverty in a location that had been enjoying two decades of full employment and unprecedented economic growth. In a welfare state culture, this evidence was socially confronting, so much so that in 1972 the conservative Liberal Country Party Government commissioned Professor Henderson to undertake an inquiry into aspects of poverty in Australia. With the election of a Labor Government later that year, the terms of reference were broadened. The main Commission report was published in 1975.¹⁷ But this was now a very different political and economic environment from the time the inquiry was first commissioned. In the less than three years between the commissioning and the delivery of the report, it was clear that the long, post-war economic boom was over, and governments were now facing fiscal constraint for the first time in the post-war period. It was no time for expenditure on poverty and, in retrospect, this was the beginning of a historic turn away from the 'welfare state'. Accordingly, the Henderson Inquiry never converted into policy, although its framework and methods still stand as the benchmark for the definition and measurement of poverty in Australia, albeit not without criticism.¹⁸

The Henderson measure was defined in broadly the same terms as the Harvester Judgment. It was benchmarked to a family of a couple plus two children, although its calculations were based on a basic wage plus child endowment, reflecting the development of a social wage perspective. Moreover, it was, like the Harvester Judgment, based on an absolute rather than a relative measure of basic living standards. Further, like Mr. Justice Higgins' calculation of a basic wage, Henderson's measure of poverty was associated with incomes to sustain consumption but not investment. In this regard, for Henderson, housing proved critical in the determination of poverty: 'the actual situation revealed by poverty-after-housing-cost is the most important indication of poverty'.¹⁹ In the Henderson Report, and, indeed, in all subsequent studies of poverty, home ownership is a defining issue. Even today, the contemporary calculations of the Henderson poverty line provide a measure with and without home ownership.²⁰ So while the Henderson Inquiry stood, and still stands, as a benchmark for measuring poverty, it has not translated into active state policy despite occasional political posturing to the contrary. Half a century on, however, it has become a central arm of a private form of economic regulation.

Neo-Liberal Benchmarks for Labour

Before seeing how the Henderson poverty line has acquired a new meaning, we must re-frame the conception of the minimum wage in its recent evolution. A full narrative of poverty and minimum wage benchmarks in Australia since the time of the Henderson inquiry would take us on a long journey, so we can simply note the development since the 1990s of a social and economic order that is popularly depicted as 'neo-liberalism'. It is not a satisfactory label: indeed the very notion of a label which suggests singularity of purpose and outcome is inevitably limited. Nonetheless, 'neo-liberalism' certainly reflects clearly a shift towards the culture of individualism in social and economic life.

In terms of labour, two critical shifts can be noted. The first is the shift of employment contracts away from the Higgins objective of 'fair and reasonable remuneration obviously designed for the benefit of the employees ... and meant to secure to them something which they cannot get by the ordinary system of individual bargaining with employees'²¹ and towards competitively-driven outcomes. Progressively, wage and working conditions have moved to become consistent with globally-competitive rates of profit for capital. Conversely, for workers, the emphasised rights are those of individuals rather than the collective rights of organised labour.

The second is the shift from reliance on state-funded pension schemes to increasingly-self-funded retirement. Central here has been the state policy of compulsory superannuation, but more generally, there is the expectation that 'ordinary' people will acquire a portfolio of capital, especially houses and shares, to be actively managed so as to secure an adequate stream of income in old age. It is in this framework that we have seen a spate of working-class borrowing – some to fund consumption, but much for the purpose of property and share purchases.²² Much of this may be aspirational of living standards above those supported by wages and pension, but the effect, whatever its motivation, is to place labour in a position of exposure to financial risk: risks that are more conspicuous and more complex than ever before.

The effect is that labour's life-long standard of living becomes increasingly contingent upon each individual's acumen in financial management. Indeed, we see what Randy Martin has called the 'financialization of daily life',²³ as individuals must make all sorts of financial calculations, such as whether to borrow, who to borrow from, and at fixed or floating rates, which telephone, electricity and health insurance contract; which superannuation fund, and so on. From the perspective of global financial markets, the International Monetary Fund has contended that 'the household sector is acting more as a "shock absorber of last resort"',²⁴ in reference to the fact that households now take on a new, and often acknowledged spectrum of financial risks.

These two shifts are a direct reflection of the individualism that characterises neo-liberalism: individual productivity, and hence bargaining power, and individual fiscal acumen. Together, they can be thought of as constituting labour as a form of capital. Labour not only works for productivity-determined wages, but must also manage its own financial exposures and accumulate for its future in the manner of a small business.

Labour's income, therefore, is not to be understood as simply wages for consumption. Today, the wage takes on both consumption and investment dimensions. For labour, it is presented as the opportunity to participate in capital accumulation, as depicted, for example, in the notion of the shareholder society. From the perspective of the class of capital (industrial, commercial and financial), this development opens up different opportunities: a surplus can be appropriated from labour not just via the wage relationship, but via financial relationships also – be it interest on loans to workers, commissions on their investment portfolios, or even in contractual arrangements for essential services. We saw that H.V. McKay understood this potential in his relationship with his workers at the Sunshine Harvester Company: part of what he paid to workers could be clawed back by the provision of housing and credit. One hundred years on we see it played out in a parallel way, though in a very different context.

The McKay Formula as Social Norm (with help from Henderson)

The twenty-first century context now pertains not to public policy about working-class minimum standards, but to financial institution calculations about credit risk in relation to working-class borrowers. Specifically, the banks and mortgage originators lending to labour for accumulation must calculate the capacity of labour to service its debts. Just how much of labours' income must go to meeting consumption levels, and how much can be dedicated to interest payments on investments? For the lending institutions this is a basic issue of credit risk management: the risk of default.

The essence of the calculation is to determine what proportion of a weekly income a worker can afford to allocate to interest payments. If a lender makes too conservative an estimate they will see workers going to more 'generous' lenders; but if the lender is too 'generous', there is the danger that the borrower will default on the loan. In essence, the question of how much to lend becomes: what is the minimum level of consumption below which a borrower can be anticipated to default on their loan repayments rather than reduce consumption to meet the repayments?

Traditionally, lenders adopted a debt servicing ratio: a certain portion of income would be attributed to consumption; another proportion to debt servicing. A general figure of up to 30 per cent for debt servicing was often adopted. This meant that as income grows, consumption and debt servicing can both grow proportionately. But this traditional calculation is being replaced by the adoption of net income surplus models. As described by John Laker, Chairman of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA):

These models require the borrower to have a minimum surplus of net after-tax income after taking into account debt servicing, other fixed payments and a basic level of living expenses. In contrast to the debt servicing ratio method, these expenses do not vary with the borrower's income ... At the same time, net income surplus models can in principle allow a higher level of borrowing than the debt servicing ratio method for borrowers with the same characteristics.²⁵

So in applying net income surplus models, how do lending institutions determine the basic level of living standards, above which income can be constituted as 'surplus' and so allocated to debt servicing? According to Laker, a survey by APRA shows that:

[M]ost ADIs [authorised deposit-taking institutions] use either the Henderson Poverty Index (HPI) or (the higher) Household Expenditure Survey (HES) data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics as the basis for their living expense calculations. Around 20 per cent of ADIs add a margin to these calculations to account for error in the estimates. Our review indicated that many lenders were, at the time, using estimates of living expenses below the HPI or were not regularly updating their estimates. [emphasis added]²⁶

In other words, the Henderson poverty line, which Henderson himself defined as 'so austere as, we believe, to make it unchallengeable',²⁷ re-emerges as a key determinant of acceptable living standards. It re-enters not as the determinant of a 'basic wage' per se, but as a working-class standard of living, via the division of the wage into a consumption and investment component.

Conclusion

When Mr Justice Higgins determined the wage of seven shillings a day, there was no formal division of a wage into consumption and surplus components. The wage was simply sufficient to meet 'the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being in a civilized community'. Provision for old age was the domain of the emerging facility of government aged pensions. Surpluses, implicitly, were deemed to be the province of capital. Accordingly, rent appeared in his deliberations as just another, albeit quantitatively important, cost of living.

Over the subsequent century, real wages have risen beyond what is required to purchase that 1907 bundle of goods. This is partly a matter of growing social wealth, affording increased social expectations of consumption, and partly about the changing meaning of wages in different eras. Indeed, wages have grown sufficiently such that 'rent' cannot be classified simply as a cost of providing basic housing. 'Rent' opens up a broader range of expenditure options for labour, and in the context of self-funded old age rather than reliance on pensions, this component of income assumes major importance. 'Rent' becomes increasingly part of the calculation of investment and labours' participation in accumulation, rather than consumption.

It is, therefore, a point of some irony to note how the Henderson report on poverty, in many ways a high point of Australian social democracy but which disappeared with the turn to neo-liberalism, now returns to define for the working class not just poverty but potential in accumulation.

Do the credit risk calculations of mortgage originators and banks constitute a new benchmark for working-class living standards of the status of the Harvester Judgment or the Henderson poverty inquiry? Probably not, for these are private calculations not explicitly social benchmarks. But as the state withdraws from the determination of these benchmarks in the name of individual rights and market forces, these sorts of calculations may turn out to have no less impact than the earlier two.

Dick Bryan is Associate Professor of Political Economy at Sydney University. His research focuses on international finance and money, and the way it transforms social calculation. With Michael Rafferty, he published in 2006 Capitalism with Derivatives: a Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class.
<dickb@usyd.edu.au>

Endnotes

^*� Comments on earlier drafts of this article by Mike Rafferty Nick Coates and the two Labour History anonymous referees are greatly appreciated

^1.� Henry Higgins (Mr Justice), 'Excise Tariff 1906 – (No 16 of 1906) – Application for declaration that wages are fair and reasonable – Test of fairness and reasonableness', 1907. Downloaded from: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/law/harvester.pdf (accessed 3 September 2007).

^2.� Commonwealth of Australia, Commission of Inquiry into Poverty (Ronald Henderson, Chairman), Poverty in Australia: First Main Report, 2 vols., Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1975.

^3.� See, for example, Corinne Cortesse, David Aylward and John Glynn, 'Our Retirement in their Hands: A User Perspective', Australian Accounting Review, vol.116, no. 2, 2006, pp. 32–40.

^4.� ACOSS (Australian Council of Social Service), 'Submission to Australian Treasury: proposals to simplify superannuation'. August 2006. Downloaded from http://www.acoss.org.au/upload/publications/submissions/3003__acoss%20superannuation%202006.pdf (accessed 1 December 2007).

^5.� Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992.

^6.� Humphrey McQueen, 'Who says there's a cabal between labour and capital in Australia?', The Australian Financial Review, 2 November, 2007.

^7.� Higgins, 'Excise Tariff', p. 5. Mr Justice Higgins refers to imported harvesters facing a tariff of £12 each under the Customs Tariff of 1906, and Australian-made harvesters an excise of £6 each, though the excise could be waived if the Australian manufacturer paid wages which were deemed 'fair and reasonable'.

^8.� Mr Justice Higgins noted in his judgment that he had 112 applications from Victorian manufacturers from which to choose a test case. One of the reasons he chose the Harvester case was that it was expected to be 'keenly fought' (Ibid., p. 2).

^9.�Ibid., p. 7.

^10.�Ibid., p. 5–6.

^11.� Geoffrey Blainey, A History of the AMP, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1999, p. 163.

^12.� John Lack, 'McKay, Hugh Victor (1865–1926)' Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986, p. 293. Downloaded from: http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A100286b.htm (accessed 16 October 2007).

^13.� G. Ayton, A History of Sunshine. No date. Downloaded from http://www.ayton.id.au/gary/History/H_Aust_Vic_Sunshine.htm (accessed 16 October 2007).

^14.� Lack, 'McKay, H.V.', p. 294.

^15.� The term ground rent, familiar in classical political economy, is used here to cover both housing rent and the interest paid on loans for the purchase of land.

^16.� It warrants noting that McKay also, at a later stage, developed pensions and retirement allowances, a sick pay scheme, and a mortuary fund. These are precisely the sorts of investments in the future that Higgins had excluded from his determination of the basic wage.

^17.� Commonwealth of Australia, Poverty in Australia.

^18.� P. Whiteford, 'The Australian System of Social Protection: An Overview', Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Family and Community Services, Policy Research Paper, no. 1. 2000, ch. 6 provides a brief summary of evaluations of the measure. Downloaded from http://www.facsia.gov.au/research/prp01/sec6.htm (accessed 11 November 2007).

^19.� Commonwealth of Australia, Poverty in Australia, p. 15.

^20.� 'With' and 'without' home ownership are the two polar measures adopted. Individuals with mortgages may be somewhere between the poles. For the most recent updates see Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, Poverty Lines: Australia 2007. It contains calculations of a poverty line with and without housing included. Available at: http://melbourneinstitute.com/labour/inequality/poverty/ (accessed 11 November 2007).

^21.� Higgins, 'Excise Tariff', p. 2

^22.� Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 'Components of Household Wealth' 4102.0: Australian Social Trends, 2006. Downloaded from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/82C0472B878EC65BCA2571B00015AD5E?opendocument (accessed 3 November 2007).

^23.� Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2002.

^24.� IMF (International Monetary Fund),. Global Financial Stability Report, April,2005, p. 89. Downloaded from: http://www.imf.org/External/Pubs/FT/GFSR/2005/01/index.htm (accessed 9 March 2006).

^25.� John F. Laker, (Chairman, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority), 'Credit Standards In Housing Lending: Some Further Insights', The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, Melbourne, 20 June 2007, p. 3. Downloaded from: http://www.apra.gov.au/Speeches/upload/04-Chart-Acctnts-MN-20-Jun-07.pdf (accessed 18 July 2007).

^26.�Ibid., p. 4.

^27.� R.F Henderson, A. Harcourt and R.J.A Harper, People in Poverty: A Melbourne Survey, University of Melbourne Press, Melbourne, 1970.

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