It has been justly said that economic liberty must precede political liberty. Liberty is meaningless when hunger, starvation, and destitution stare at a man at every step.
Nor can there be any liberty, when there is a constant fear of unemployment and “insufficiency which, perhaps more than any other inadequacies, sap the whole strength of personality.” The problem of the tummy and shelter is, undoubtedly, the foremost.
By economic freedom we mean “security and opportunity to find reasonable significance in the earning of one’s daily bread.” It is the freedom from want and freedom from fear. For liberty to be real, it is essential that every citizen should be free from the constant fear of unemployment and insufficiency. He must be safeguarded against the wants of tomorrow.
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Economic liberty aims at the creation of that structure of society wherein there is sufficiency for all before there is superfluity for the few. In such a society there is no class domination.
The worker is not merely the seller of labour and recipient of orders, but a producer of services who finds in his work scope for the enrichment of his personality. “Without these freedoms, or, at least, access to them, men are hardly less truly slaves than when they were exposed for purchase and sale.”
Economic liberty implies democracy in industry. Democracy in industry means two things. In the first place, it means that workers possess certain economic rights.
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These rights consist in the individual’s right to work, right to reasonable hours of work, and to a minimum wage, right to leisure by the regulation of hours of work, right to benefits against unemployment, sickness, accidents and old age, right to form unions and to fight for the redress of his grievances.
Secondly, democracy in industry means that workers should have positive control in industry. In the absence of positive control, there is no spontaneity, initiative is frustrated and workers work mechanically.
They subject themselves to the “routine” nature of work for fear of starvation. “A system built upon fear is always fatal to the release of the creative faculties, and it is, therefore, incompatible with liberty.”