Abstract
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 suh agreements. 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 less than 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. Before the War, outside the organised industries, the adjustment was made by the mdi- vidual action of the employers, who first felt the need; to-day the process of general wage-changes has, we may say, been constitutionalised.
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CLAY, H. The Public Regulation of Wages in Great Britain. Nature 124, 377–381 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124377a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124377a0