SECTION F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 



THE PUBLIC REGULATION OF 

 WAGES IN GREAT BRITAIN. 



ADDRESS BY 



PROF. HENRY CLAY, 



PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 



A GREAT change has taken place during the last twenty years in the 

 methods of negotiating wage-changes. In 1910, when the Labour 

 Department of the Board of Trade published the result of an inquiry 

 into collective agreements, it was estimated that 2,400,000 workpeople 

 worked under conditions specifically regulated by such agreements. The 

 report adds — and the addition is important- — that there were a large 

 number of other workpeople whose wages, hours of labour, and other 

 conditions followed, and were in effect governed by these agreements ; 

 but a generous allowance for this addition will still leave the total far 

 short of the wage-earning population, which, excluding domestic servants 

 as outside the probable field of collective bargaining, numbered about 

 thirteen millions. 



Trade unionism was, however, spreading. In 1914 the total member- 

 ship, which at the time of the inquiry was 2^ millions, had grown to over 

 four millions. It reached a peak of 8^ millions in 1920, and was 

 still 4,908,000 in 1927, the latest year for which returns are available. 

 More significant in principle than this expansion of an existing instrument 

 of control was the direct intervention of the State in the fixing of wages by 

 the Trade Boards (Minimum Wage) Act of 1909. Confined at first to 

 trades in which wages were ' exceptionally low,' this Act made the 

 settlement of minimum rates of wages by a representative joint body 

 compulsory, associated with the representatives of the workpeople and 

 employers impartial members, who would represent the interest in the 

 settlement of the general public and also ensure a decision in case of 

 deadlock, and provided for the enforcement of the rates fixed by the 

 appropriate Government Department. The scope of this machinery was 

 extended after 1918, when an Amending Act substituted for ' exceptionally 

 low wages ' the absence of adequate machinery for the effective regulation 

 of wages as the differentia of the trades to which the Acts might be 

 applied ; and in 1925 it was estimated that a million and a half work- 

 people had their wages regulated by Trade Boards. A less revolutionary 

 extension of Government activity was the approval given to the Whitley 

 scheme of Joint Industrial Councils and assistance in the formation of 

 such councils ; as a result of which it was estimated, rather optimistically, 

 that three million workpeople were covered in 1925.^ In the same cate- 



' Balfour Committee, Interim Report on Industrial Relations, p. 47. 



