120 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



gory may be placed the scheme of Conciliation Coimcils in the railway 

 industry, embodied in Part IV of the Railways Act of 1921. Finally, 

 temporarily by the Corn Production Act of 1917, and permanently by 

 the Agricultural Wages Boards Act of 1924, the benefits, whatever they 

 may be, of organised settlement of wage-rates by representative bodies 

 were extended to the last great unorganised group, the agricultural 

 labourers. It is not possible to compute a figure for a recent year to 

 correspond with the 2,400,000 of 1910, because the status of collective 

 bargaining in certain important industries is obscure ; but if we add 

 together the numbers covered by Trade Boards, Agricultural Wages 

 Boards, Joint Industrial Councils, and Unions in certain industries, which, 

 like coal and cotton, have adopted none of these forms of organisation, 

 we get a total of eight millions out of a wage-earning population, which, 

 excluding domestic service, numbers something under fourteen millions. 

 When we remember that the influence of an agreement or a determination, 

 reached by a representative body, tends to go beyond the limits of the 

 membership of the organisations, and even trades, directly represented, 

 we may safely conclude that there are few important gaps left in the 

 provision for the settlement of wages by collective bargaining in Great 

 Britain. 



The precise nature of this change is worth some consideration. It 

 was not the introduction for the first time of standardised rates of pay 

 in time-work occupations. Even if we leave out of account the con- 

 siderable part of the field covered by trade unionism at the beginning of 

 the century, it is probable that in most districts, in which an occupation 

 was followed by considerable numbers, there were customary rates 

 commonly recognised, which the majority of employers observed. These 

 rates were not so definite and secure as they became when they were 

 embodied in a collective agreement ; but, outside the so-called ' sweated 

 trades,' they were a limitation on the freedom of the individual employer 

 to vary rates. Immediately, wages were fixed for him rather than by 

 him, although ultimately they had to conform to the demand for labour, 

 of which he was the channel. Nor was the change an universal substitu- 

 tion of collective for individual bargaining about rates. In piece-work 

 industries after the change, as before, the vast majority of rates were 

 settled by an individual bargain between the workman and the 

 employer's representative. The change was a change in the procedure 

 by which general changes in wages are effected, in response to general 

 changes in the economic conditions of a trade or of industry as a whole, 

 and its essence was the extension of collective bargaining for this purpose 

 from a part of the field of commercial wage-employment, say a quarter, 

 to the whole. 



The effects of collective bargaining are of course not limited to general 

 changes in wages. It provides an opportunity of effective appeal against 

 grievances of all kinds, which does not exist in its absence, and tends to a 

 more definite standardisation of wages and conditions. When first 

 introduced it usually brings about a rise in wages ; the Agricultural 

 Wages Boards, when first established in 1924, raised weekly wage-rates 

 by an average of 3s\ a week, although there was no change in the economic 

 conditions of English agriculture to justify any such change, and the 



