WHICH ARE THE LOWER PAID WORKERS?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1967.tb00520.x |
| Date | 01 November 1967 |
| Published date | 01 November 1967 |
| Author | Judith Marquand |
WHICH ARE
THE
LOWER PAID
WORKERS?
JUDITH
MARQUAND*
THIS
paper is concerned with the problem of locating the main groups
of
low paid male workers whose pay may be too low to maintain an adequate
standard of living, not because they have large families to support, but
simply because their pay is very low indeed. An attempt is made to ana-
lyse some of the main economic characteristics of such groups.’
That such workers do exist, albeit in fairly small numbers when only
men in full-time work are considered, is made apparent by the Ministry
of Social Security
Report
on
the Circumstances
of
Families.2
This shows (Table
11.1) that in the summer of 1966 there were 125,000 families with
two
or
more children with the father in full-time work (more than
30
hours per
week), with total resources less than the supplementary benefit level for
such families. Of these 125,000 families,
55,000
had only two children
(Table 11.3). There were
65,000
families with the fathers in full-time work
whose resources were less than El2 10s. per week. The Report does not
consider families with less than two children; hence it does not provide a
complete estimate of the number of men in full-time work with incomes at
this extremely low level. It does not provide a detailed analysis by industry
or occupation of the fathers of families with resources below supplementary
benefit level, other than
to
state that ‘about
85,000
of the fathers whose
families’ resources did not meet requirements were manual workers,
about
20,000
were employed otherwise than
as
manual workers and about
20,000
were self-employed’ (p.
12,
para.
30).
They were distributed fairly
evenly, in proportion to numbers employed, throughout industry with
disproportionately heavy concentrations only in Agriculture and among
the self-employed (Table IV.11, p. 39), but no attempt is made to dis-
tinguish among the various sections of manufacturing industry, where
about
40
per cent both of the whole sample in the survey and of those with
resources below requirements were found (p. 12, para.
29).
Hence it may
be concluded that recent evidence shows that there
is
a significant number
of men in full-time employment, without particularly large families, whose
incomes are such that their families’ total resources are below the extremely
modest Supplementary Benefit level.3 When
a
higher level of income
than the Supplementary Benefit level (except for very large families) is
*
Economic Adviser, Department of Economic Affairs
I
am grateful to
Mr
E.
Tipper for assistance in preparing the material for the statistical
analysis.
For a family with two adults and two children, and with a rent allowance
of
approximately
#
10s.
per week, the net weekly resources associated with the Supplementary Benefit level are
in the region of
El
1
10s.
to
El2
103.
per
week, depending on the age of the children.
359
a
H.M.S.O.
July 1967
360
BRITISH
JOURNAL
OF
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
considered, it is found that net weekly resources in
8
per cent of families
with the fathers in full-time work and where the mothers do not earn are
below L14 (Table
IV.6,
p.
35).
To
the extent that the problem of very low earnings relative to needs
is a problem
of
large families, it is clearly inappropriate to attempt to
remedy it by raising the earnings of whole groups of workers defined by
occupation or by industry. However, the evidence above suggests that
there is a problem of low pay, even for some relatively small families where
the father
is
working full-time, and hence that it
is
worthwhile to try to
identify those groups of workers who are particularly low paid.
The problem of women’s pay will not be considered in this paper,
partly because it is already unequivocally established that most women
are low paid relative to most men, but mainly because the statistical in-
formation on the distribution of women’s earnings in the Ministry of
Labour distribution of earnings survey in October
1960
has two major
faults: all workers who work for
30
hours a week or more are included, as
are all women over the age
of
18.
Hence any groups of workers who are
shown to have received particularly low pay may well include women
who work less than a standard week, and girls aged 18-2 1 who are paid on
less than the adult scale.
IDENTIFICATION
OF
GROUPS
OF
Low
PAID
WORKERS
The most important source of information about the distribution of
earnings by industry is the Ministry of Labour Distribution
of
Earnings
Survey of
1960.
Various objections have been raised to the use
of
this
survey, particularly that it is out of date, that it records weekly earnings
rather than hourly earnings, and that its coverage outside manufacturing
industry is inadeq~ate.~ Since
it
is
well established that the inter-industry
earnings structure is extremely stable over long periods, the fact that the
survey was conducted six years ago
is
unlikely to cause serious error. That
the distribution of hourly earnings as well as weekly earnings is not
recorded is unfortunate, and
a
rough attempt to examine the behaviour
of hourly earnings in low paid industries is made later. The main indus-
tries omitted from the survey are agriculture, coal-mining, docks, railways,
retail distribution and catering; and some attempt to relate such infor-
mation as
is
readily available concerning earnings in these industries to
the information available for other industries is made on pages
370-2.
The 1960 Distribution of Earnings Survey presents the information
collected in two ways. In one set of tables are shown, by Minimum List
Headings, the numbers of workers receiving less than
E7
per week,
&7
and
less than
E8
per week and
so
on. In the other set
of
tables are shown for
each industry earnings at the lowest decile of manual workers, at the
For
a discussion
of
the
deficiencies
of
the
1960
Survey,
see
D.
Robinson
‘Low
Paid
LVorkers
and
Incomes
Policy’,
Bulletin
of
the
Oxford
University Institute
of
Economics and Statistics,
February
1967
pp.
2-7
To continue reading
Request your trial