Reform of the relationship in industry between employers and employed involves three things: securing contentment, achieving co-operation, increasing production; these constitute the dynamic trinity. Only when contentment can be secured is co-operation made possible; without co-operation there never can be efficient production; production alone can create the prosperity which is the sole source of the financial ability of any industry to pay high wages and maintain good conditions of employment. Contentment does not mean stagnation; it means willingness to progress under an accepted system—in other words, evolution. (_a_) Provision against Unemployment If we are to secure contentment in industry, unquestionably the first matter to be dealt with is unemployment. A distinction must be drawn between normal unemployment—the result of seasonal or cyclic depressions in trade, which arise from circumstances well-known in industry, either affecting the world at large or peculiar to some country in particular, or special to some national industry—and the abnormal unemployment which has resulted from the Great War. We are now considering normal unemployment. What Government should do to deal with the abnormal unemployment occasioned by the war we have already discussed in Chapter XXII. Equalization of Demand for Labour In regard to normal unemployment there are two things only which can be done:—first, to reduce, so far as possible, fluctuations in the demand for labour between one year and another, and one season of the year with another season of the same year, and, secondly, to make the best provision economically practicable for the maintenance during times of trade depression of persons who are unemployed or under-employed. It is most difficult to “equalize the demand for labour.” In ordinary commercial business that is a matter largely outside the power of Government, employers, or Trade Unions. It is one of the privileges which is reserved for the consumer. The only directions in which fruitful action can be taken are to provide a system such as exists under the Labour Exchange organization, or that of certain Trade Unions, whereby the workman out of a job can be put in touch with the employer who wants labour of his particular description, and to arrange the execution of public works by Government Departments or local authorities, and the manufacture of stores or equipment for public purposes, the amount of which is more or less standard, so that by postponing some and expediting others some advance is possible towards making more uniform the demand for labour as between good times and bad. But the limits within which this is a practicable policy are much narrower than is generally realized, and immensely more restricted than is suggested by the Labour Party. Insurance against Unemployment