An idea is commonly encountered among the rank and file that to keep up the labour costs of every operation or job is the best way to maintain the general value of the labour of the operatives concerned. An illustration may be taken from the engineering industry. In engineering, as is well known, England was the pioneer. The practice in the early days was for a skilled turner or millwright, or other craftsman, to undertake a job, perform all the necessary machine and bench operations, and carry it through to completion. Later, as work increased in volume, and still later in diversity, there gradually evolved a differentiation between the turner and the fitter, and in more recent times, between turners and fitters and other kinds of engineering craftsmen. But the essence of the business was that every person concerned in the work should be a tradesman, or skilled man. In recent times, the employers succeeded in establishing “their right”—which is now being questioned—to promote unskilled men, perhaps shop labourers, to work certain classes of machines, capstan and turret lathes, etc. These men were graded as machinists, and when the trade became organized generally received about three-fourths of the skilled turner’s rate. They were designated “semi-skilled” men. The point to be observed is that any operation among the many thousands that constitute skilled work is deemed to be a “skilled operation,” performable only by a skilled man, and if in special circumstances it is undertaken by any other person, supposing such an improbable case, it carries the full skilled rate of pay. Very similar, but somewhat less rigid, conventions exist in regard to semi-skilled work. The inflexible way in which the engineering Unions enforce these trade practices has certainly reserved exclusively for skilled men a large sphere of work, but it keeps up production costs, and retards development of the industry. Whenever a new and improved machine has been introduced, a machine, say, of a type where the skill was mainly in the machine, and no longer to anything like the same degree required of the worker, there has been a constant struggle between the Unions and the employers as to whether the machine should or should not be operated by a skilled man. Sometimes the employers have won, sometimes the Unions—it is a pure question of relative strength. But the obvious waste of skill in employing one skilled man on one of these machines when he could manage two or more, and the payment of the skilled rate, all added to the prevailing limitation of production, have discouraged English employers from installing up-to-date appliances and so cheapening production.