THE CHANGING NATURE OF NATIONAL WAGE AGREEMENTS*
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1978.tb00240.x |
| Author | Michael Terry,William Brown |
| Date | 01 June 1978 |
| Published date | 01 June 1978 |
Scottish
Journal
of
Political Economy,
Vol.
25,
No.
2,
June
1978
THE CHANGING NATURE
OF
NATIONAL
WAGE AGREEMENTS*
WILLIAM
BROWN
AND
MICHAEL
TERRY
Industrial Relations Research
Unit
of
the
SSRC,
University
of
Warwick
I
There appears to be considerable confusion over the part played by national
agreements in the process of wage determination in Britain. To some authors
they are of central importance, while to others they are all but insignificant.
Although the statistical data are not yet available to permit the definitive
resolution of this argument, we seek in this article to reassess the importance
of national agreements in a suggestive rather than conclusive way, and to
suggest some ways in which the problem might be redefined.
The question was raised by an article in the Department of Employment
Gazette
(1 975)
which demonstrated that “wage drift” as defined by Phelps
Brown
(1962)’
had been declining since its peak during the period
1961-65,
and was very slight-indeed, negative in some periods-during the early
1970s.
Next, Elliott and Steele
(1976)
called attention “once again to the
primary role played by national agreements within the wage determination
process” and sought to demonstrate the “steady growth in importance of
national agreements over recent years”.
Also
from Aberdeen, Addison
(1976)
argued that the increasing importance of what is left when you subtract over-
time, bonus and other additions from manual worker’s earnings is “contrary
to received industrial relations theory or, more strictly, to that part of the
theory which would consider the post-war decomposition of the industrial
relations system to be a stable long-run phenomenon”. There is, furthermore,
a
substantial and continuing body of economic research which relies upon the
published data on nationally negotiated wage rates in the explicit belief that
these are of primary causal importance to wage determination.2
*
A
version of this paper
was
presented to the British Universities Industrial Relations
Association
1977
Annual Conference at Lancaster under the title “The Unimportance of
National Agreements”. The authors are grateful
for
the helpful comments received there
as well as from their colleagues at Warwick.
Phelps Brown observed that “the essence of drift is that the effective rate
of
pay
per
unit of labour input is raised by arrangements that lie outside the control of recognised
procedures
for
scheduling rates”.
op.
cit.
Among others are the studies by Brown
(1955).
Phillips
(1958),
Lipsey
(1960).
Hines
(1964),
Gillion
(1968),
Parkin
(1970),
Lipsey and Parkin
(1970),
Johnston and Timbrel1
(1972),
Ashenfelter and Pencavel
(1973,
Coutts, Tarling and Wilkinson
(1976),
Elliott
(1976),
and Ashenfelter and Pencavel
(1976).
Date
of
receipt of final manuscript:
9
December
1977.
9 119
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