PUBLIC POLICY ON MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA‐A COMPARISON
| Date | 01 June 1963 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1963.tb00335.x |
| Published date | 01 June 1963 |
| Author | E. G. A. Armstrong |
PUBLIC POLICY ON MINIMUM WAGE LEGISLATION IN
BRITAIN AND AMERICA-A COMPARISON
E.
G.
A.
ARMSTRONG
SINCE
1952 successive British governments have exerted sporadic
pressure on employers and trade unions to agree to
a
reduction in the
number
of
Wages Councils, whereas in 1961 Congress extended the
coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act to an additional 3.6 million
workers. This latter process is expected to continue, bringing in more
sections
of
the retail and catering trades, laundering and, most
controversially, farm employment. This article examines the factors
that have shaped public policy on minimum wage laws in the two
countries and seeks to explain significant divergences in legislative
development. It discusses whether the laws are still serving the
purposes for which they were designed, whether the procedural means
are appropriate to ends which themselves may be changing, and
whether future public policy may alter.
The
Purpose
of
Minimum
Wage Legislation
:
The main purpose of minimum wage legislation is to raise effec-
tively the wages of the lowest paid workers.
A
related purpose is
the removal
of
unfair competition based on socially offensive wage
levels. There is common agreement between Britain and America
on
these objectives; but there is an important difference
of
emphasis on
the role
of
such legislation as an economic stabiliser.
British minimum wage legislation was conceived as sectional in
character, giving help first to workers in sweated industries and later,
much more extensively, to workers in industries where collective
bargaining was weak. The Trade Boards Acts were not born out
of
general economic depression
of
the magnitude that helped to shape
the American Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and they were not
designed to boost mass purchasing power. While the Catering Wages
Act of 1943, and the Wages Councils Acts of 1945, 1948 and 1959
also remained silent on this point, the concept may be said to have
been implicitly adopted, in its negative form, by the greatly increased
coverage of these later laws, for Bevin’s fear that in the post-1945
reconstruction period, wages might be slashed, was widely shared.
Significantly, however, the legislation followed the old pattern of near
autonomous negotiations between employers and unions with State
243
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