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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
Britain has no statutory minimum wage. There is a system of wages councils responsible for fixing statutory minimum rates in forty-one trades where wages are low relative to the average, opportunities for working overtime are variable and no adequate machinery for collective bargaining exists. A peculiar feature of this system is the presence of three independent members who form a third ‘side’ in council negotiations. This article looks back briefly over the seventy years of the existence of wages councils (originally trade boards) and the changes in function which have occurred albeit by implication rather than overtly. It then proceeds to examine the role of the independent members within the system as it is now. Do these ‘conciliators with a casting vote’ fulfil a useful function? The main problem facing them today is seen as the need to reconcile the original purpose of helping to fix a just (or less unjust) wage translated into contemporary terms with a remuneration which is reasonable and feasible under the circumstances prevailing within the trades covered by wages councils.
1 “The fixing of a maximum wage was one of the functions of local bodies in the first half of the fourteenth century in England…But it was the Australian legislation of 1894 and 1896 that gave the impetus to the modern minimum wage legislation movement’ – Sells, Dorothy, The British Trade Boards System, P. S. King and Son, London, 1923, p. 1.Google Scholar
2 Wages Councils Act 1979Google Scholar, Section 14(1). Compare this section with Wages Councils Act 1959Google Scholar, Section 11(1).
3 Wages Councils Act 1979Google Scholar, Section 1(2) (a) (c) (my italics). Paragraph (c) includes provisions relating to the involvement of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS).
4 Wootton, Barbara, The Social Foundations of Wages Policy, Allen and Unwin, London, 1955, pp. 85–7.Google Scholar
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid. p. 86.
7 Tawney, R. H., The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Chain-Making Industry under the Trade Boards Act of 1909, published for the Ratan Tata Foundation by G. Bell and Sons, London, 1914, p. 32.Google Scholar
8 Bayliss, F. J., British Wages Councils, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1962Google Scholar, ch. 7.
9 Department of Employment, Statutory Minimum Wages and Holidays with Pay: The Wages Councils Act Briefly Explained, HMSO, London, 1977, para. 11.Google Scholar
10 Sells, op. cit. p. 14. It is interesting to note that Sells seems to equate the third independent member, the ‘benevolent lady’, with ‘social worker’.
11 It was not always so. Sells refers disapprovingly to the privilege of voting by sides which could be granted only by the minister: ‘Side voting…tends to hinder the expression of individual opinion by vote, and strikes at the root of the representative theory’ – Sells, op. cit. ch. 1.
12 Committee of Inquiry into the Working and Effect of the Trade Board Acts (Cave Committee) 1922, Minutes of Evidence, p. 660, quoted in Bayliss, F. J., ‘The Independent Members of Wages Councils’, British Journal of Sociology, 8:1 (1957), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Tawney, op. cit. p. 33.
14 Tawney, R. H., Minimum Rates in the Tailoring Industry under the Trade Boards Act of 1909, published for the Ratan Tata Foundation by G. Bell and Sons, London, 1915.Google Scholar
15 Sullivan, Jill, ‘Low Pay Report’, Low Pay Bulletin, 17 (1977).Google Scholar
16 Department of Employment, British Labour Statistics Year Book, HMSO, London, 1970, and 1975Google Scholar, Table 8.
17 Pond, Chris, ‘Prices and Prejudice’, Low Pay Bulletin, 22 and 23 (1978).Google ScholarThe arguments presented were countered in Department of Employment, Gazette, 03 1977, pp. 250–3.Google Scholar
18 There were then approximately 3 million workers in the wages council sector. Their numbers declined in 1978, with the abolition of two councils, and the latest figures published by the Department of Employment show that in 1978 2.75 million workers in an estimated 391,000 establishments were covered by forty-one councils – Department of Employment, Gazette, 87:5 (1979). 454.Google Scholar
19 House of Commons, 1977Google Scholar, Hansard, Vol. 941, written answers, col. 49.
20 Sinfield, A., ‘Analyses in the Social Division of Welfare’, Journal of Social Policy, 7:2 (1978), 129–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Low Pay Bulletin, 1 (1975).Google Scholar
22 For homeworkers in some occupations, for example button-making, a piecework basis time rate (PWBTR) is fixed: ‘It is a minimum hourly rate. Any piece rates that are paid must be so calculated that in the circumstances of the case an ordinary worker is capable of earning in an hour not less than the PWBTR’ – ACAS, Button Manufacturing Wages Council, Report no. 11, January 1978.Google Scholar Judging ‘the circumstances of the case’ and ‘an ordinary worker’ presents considerable difficulties to a wages inspector.
23 Winning the Battle Against Inflation, Cmnd 7293, HMSO, London, 1978Google Scholar, para. 17; and Department of Employment, Pay Policy Guidelines: Cash Underpinning for the Lower Paid, press release, January 1979.Google Scholar
24 Crouch, Colin, ‘Notes for an Address on Incomes Policy and Social Policy’, presented at the annual conference of the Social Administration Association held in Bristol, July 1978.Google Scholar
25 These figures are taken from Low Pay Bulletin, 1 (1975) and 22Google Scholar and 23 (1978); and from Winning the Battle Against Inflation.
26 The TUC would probably have upheld the LPU definition, had not the intervention of pay policy under the terms of the social contract restricted the rises which the Labour government would allow.
27 Bayliss, British Wages Councils, ch. 7.
28 Sells, op. cit. p. 288.
29 ACAS, op. cit.
30 See Social Trends, no. 7, Central Statistical Office, HMSO, London, 1976, p. 122Google Scholar – Chart 5.27.
31 The Attack on Inflation after July 31st 1977, Cmnd 6882, HMSO, London, 1977Google Scholar (my italics).
32 Commission on Industrial Relations, Reports nos 36 and 46–51, HMSO, London, 1973–1974Google Scholar (four of these seven reports led to the abolition of the council in question). See also ACAS, op. cit.
33 The Department of Employment rapped the knuckles of every council which exceeded the 10 per cent (Phase Three) guideline even by less than 1 per cent.
34 ACAS, op. cit.
35 In a speech to a plenary session of the annual conference of the Social Administration Association held in Bristol, July 1978.Google Scholar
36 Wages Councils Act 1979, Sections 4, 5 and 6.
37 Sells, op. cit. p. 8.
38 Homeworkers are not unrepresented, so far as I am aware, but they lack union support.
39 Statutory joint industrial councils are hybrids: they are part of the statutory system, with power to make legally enforceable orders, but they are without independent members.
40 Field, Frank, ‘Seventy Years On: A New Report on Homeworking’, Low Pay Bulletin, 10 and 11 (1976).Google Scholar
41 Winning the Battle Against Inflation, para. 17.
42 Picton, J. G., ‘Decline and Fall?’, Low Pay Bulletin, 13 (1977).Google Scholar
43 Hird, H. Richard, ‘Poverty and the Minimum Wage’, Perception, 07–08 1978.Google Scholar
44 Kaim-Caudle, Peter, ‘Equality’, in Heisler, H. (ed.), Foundations of Social Administration, Macmillan, London and Basingstoke, 1977, ch. 6.Google Scholar
45 Piachaud, David, ‘Inequality and Social Policy’, New Society, 22 03 1979.Google Scholar
46 Picton, op. cit.
47 Hird, op. cit.
48 Piachaud, op. cit.
49 The making of these decisions would be made easier if the wages council secretariat were enlarged to enable the excellent service which it gives to members to be extended into more detailed research relating to the structure and conditions of the trades affected.
50 Sinfield, op. cit.
51 Donnison, David, ‘Social Policy since Titmuss’, Journal of Social Policy, 8:2 (1979), 145–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
