The second fact of importance is that in both cases the average wage is the same. This is the result of two circumstances—first, the commodity-theory of labour, according to which labour-power is regarded as a measureable marketable affair, subject to the law of supply and demand and separate from the personality of the worker; and second, that reserve of labour commonly called unemployment, the existence of which tends to moderate the fluctuations of the labour market. It is in the interests of capital that there should be a permanent margin of unemployment in order that the price of labour should not become excessive at any time by reason of its scarcity. In the past, the maintenance of the unemployed was, so far as their own members were affected, assumed altogether by the Trade Unions; but by the provisions of the National Insurance Act this has partly been laid upon the employer and upon the community as a whole. But, says the guildsman, since the existence of a reserve of labour seems under present conditions inseparable from the conduct of the industry; and since further, it is impossible to secure that under no conditions there will not be some margin of unemployment, the charge for the maintenance of the reserve of labour should be made to fall on the industry itself. This, however, immediately destroys the commodity-theory of labour. Under such an arrangement, the worker will be regarded not as a potential vendor of so much labour-power, subject to the law of supply and demand, and liable to lose his subsistence and that of his family by the chances of the market, but as a regular member of a society which provides a financial reserve for the purpose of maintaining him when he falls into the labour reserve. So once more, we see the status of the worker transformed. He ceases to be a “hand,” and becomes a partner. The “national guild” is really no more than the systematic development of this idea of partnership; and because it insists that this partnership shall be real and not fictitious, it rejects all schemes of democratic control in industry which (like the Garton Foundation and the Whitley schemes) still retain the commodity-theory of labour, and all schemes of profit-sharing which is the voluntary bounty of the employer. The guildsman holds that the worker has a direct interest in the thing produced apart from his hire, and that his contribution in the way of labour entitles him to a partnership in the industry as real as that of his employer, and much more real than that of the investor who does no more than rake in his dividends. To this principle of partnership, there is, of course, no logical end but the elimination of the private employer, whether an individual or a company, and the combination of the administrative, executive and productive labour in a given industry in some such way as is contemplated in the “national guild.”