Miss Collet's reply to the question is, that while the match and jam girls pay the full price of home, board, and lodging, the others often pay nothing, spending all they get upon dress and amusement. This, taken along with the influence of the competition of home-workers in the bookfolding and booksewing trades, explains the fact that the harder and higher-skilled work gets no higher wages. § 10. A knowledge of the productivity of labour as measuring the maximum wage-level, and of "wants" or standard of comfort as measuring the minimum wage-level, does not enable us to determine even approximately the actual wage-level in any industry. The actual wage may be fixed at any point between the two extremes. So far as competition is an active determinant, everything will depend upon the quantitative relation between supply and demand for labour. When there is a short supply of labour available for any work, wages may rise to the maximum; when there is more labour available than is required, wages will fall towards the minimum. But, as we have already admitted, competition works very slowly and inadequately in many of the industries in which women and children are engaged. The force of custom, assisted by ignorance of the labour market, prevents women from taking advantage of an increased demand or a decreased supply of labour to lift this wage above the customary level towards the level of productivity. Women are more contented to live as they have lived than men. As Miss Collet says, "the contentment of women themselves, when they have obtained enough for their standard of living, is another reason why competition is so ineffective among highly-skilled workers."[260] This "contentment" or apathy, partly the result of ignorance, partly the result of sex feebleness, enhanced by the exhausting burden of present industrial conditions, is alluded to by the several reports of the sub-commissioners to the Labour Commission as a chief difficulty in the effective organisation of women workers, even when the work is conducted in large factories. In other ways, woman is less of a purely "economic" creature than man. The flow of labour from one occupation to another, which tends to equalise the net advantages amongst male occupations, is far feebler among women workers, notwithstanding that trade union barriers and the vested interests of expensively-acquired skill are less operative in woman's work. The reluctance of women to freely communicate to one another facts regarding their wage and conditions of labour is particularly noted as a barrier to united action.