Read the following paragraph and choose the correct answer from the choices given below.

It seems quite clearly unjust to pay two people different amounts of money for doing the same work. But it is not as easy at it appears at first sight to introduce equal pay for equal work.

First of all, one must be sure that the work is in fact equal. Two people may be working side of side in a factory and doing the same work, but one may be doing it twice as fast as the other; or one may, be making no mistakes, while the other is making a lot. In some kinds of work, one can solve the problem of speed if one pays by the amount of work done and not by the hour work paid for in this way is called piece-work. But it is not always possible to do this, so it is sometimes useful to pay workers at different rates, which take differences in skill into account. This usually means that the younger and therefore less experienced worker gets less than the older and more experienced one, which seems reasonable enough.

What does not appear to be so reasonable is when two equally skilled, equally fast workers receive different rates of pay. In some countries, for instance, women are paid less than men for the same work.

The employers' argument in places where this happens is that men usually have a wife and children to support and women usually have not. They say that most women workers are either unmarried and have no one to support, or have husbands who also work and bring home money, so that it would be unjust for them to be paid as much as a man who has a wife who does not work because she has several children at home to look after.

This, of course, is quite true; but you do find some men workers who are unmarried and have no one to support, and some women workers who are windows and have children to support. Other women wokers, though they have no children, may have old or sick parents and young brothers and sisters who cannot yet work.

The fact is that the problem of paying workers according to their family needs cannot be solved simply by giving the men more and the women less. The answer is to pay both alike, and to leave it to the state to see that justice is done by means of taxation and allowances.