labour economics, study of the labour force as an element in the process of production. The labour force comprises all those who work for gain, whether as employees, employers, or as self-employed, and it includes the unemployed who are seeking work. Labour economics involves the study of the factors affecting the efficiency of these workers, their deployment between different industries and occupations, and the determination of their pay. In developing models for the study of these factors, this section deals with the labour force of contemporary industrialized economies.
The economist cannot study the capabilities, jobs, and earnings of men and women without taking account of psychology, social structures, cultures, and the activities of government. Indeed, these forces often play a more conspicuous part in the field of labour than do the market forces with which economic theory is mainly concerned. The most important reason for this arises from the peculiar nature of labour as a commodity. The act of hiring of labour, unlike that of hiring a machine, is necessary but not sufficient for the completion of work. Employees have to be motivated to work to an acceptable standard; the employment contract is, in effect, open-ended. This may be no problem when employees are weak and easily replaced, but the more skilled, organized, and indispensible they are, the more the care that must be given to creating an institutional setting that will win their compliance and meet their notions of fairness.
A second major reason for looking beyond straightforward labour market forces is the often highly imperfect nature of the industrialized labour market. The majority of jobs are occupied by the same employees for many years, and only a small minority of employees quits their jobs in order to move to a comparable job that is better paid. Studies in a number of countries have all revealed substantial variation in the level of pay offered for the same job by different firms in the same local labour market. This sluggishness of labour market response is particularly notable for more skilled labour and for labour employed by firms in strong product market positions. The main thrust of competition in many instances comes not through the labour market but through the product market, with an employee’s pay being determined less by what the job is than by who the employer is.
In discussing both market and nonmarket forces in labour economics, the following discussion poses them not as alternatives but as complementary explanations. The difference in pay between, for example, a craftsman and the labourer who works alongside him may be fixed by custom, an arbitrator, a job evaluation system, or a bargain with a trade union. In their different ways these are far from being merely passive agents through which market forces are transmitted into human behaviour. They may, for instance, shape the market by defining its categories of labour. Also, they may differ greatly in their speed and extent of response.
The comparative study of wage movements in different periods and countries does show many similarities and regularities that are more marked than the variety of their settings would lead one to expect. This evidence of the influence of persistent forces working within an equilibrating system is one justification for the economist’s speaking of a labour market. But there is much in labour that can be understood only with the aid of the psychologist, the sociologist, the historian, the labour lawyer, or the political scientist. Depending upon both the circumstances and the purpose for which the explanation is required, it is an empirical question how far the forces that these scientists study might interact with the market forces that are the special province of the economist.
The size of a country’s labour force, within a given total population, depends on two factors: the proportion of the total population that is of working age and the proportion of these who work for gain. The limits of working age are usually taken to be established by the minimum school-leaving age and the prevailing pensionable age. Allowance must then be made for those persons who continue to work for gain after attaining pensionable age. Typically, some two-thirds of the population of an industrial country lies within these limits.
The employed labour force may be characterized by particular activity rates. An activity rate is the proportion of the whole number in a given age and sex group—for example, females aged 30–34—who work for gain. Among males, activity rates in the earlier years of working age are as a rule low, because so many remain in education and training. Between the ages of 25 and 50, male activity rates approach 100 percent, but from age 50 onward they fall as men begin to retire. The pattern of female activity rates is very different and changed greatly in the second half of the 20th century. Formerly, female rates ran higher than male in the earlier years because fewer girls enjoyed extended education, but from the age of 20 onward they fell sharply as women married and withdrew to domestic duties. Women so occupied remain by far the largest contingent of persons of working age not in the labour force. Since World War II, however, it has been less usual for women to leave paid employment immediately on marriage. Marrying at a young age and having a small number of children has enabled many women to return to paid work in their 30s, and female activity rates have come to show a second peak between the mid-30s and the mid-40s, after which they decline more steeply than male rates. From these various activity rates there emerges an overall proportion of the gainfully occupied among all of working age that is typically in the region of two-thirds.
The quality of the labour force depends on education and training, physique, and health. There is evidence that physique has been greatly improved by increases in the standard of living in the 20th century. Because of the reduction in family size, this rise has been even more marked for children than for adults, and the effects have been seen in the greater height and weight attained by children at a given age. The beneficial effects of stronger physique on health have been enhanced by the advance of medical knowledge and the increased availability of medical services. Better health has raised productivity by a reduction in absenteeism and by a prolongation of the working life during which the economy reaps the benefit of the education and training the worker has received.
Education and training can be regarded as a kind of investment, and the rate of return it yields can be estimated. The amount of the investment is the value of the student’s use of resources—buildings, equipment, and instructors—together with the output that the economy would have enjoyed from work had the student been gainfully occupied rather than studying. The yield, in turn, is calculated by assuming that the average subsequent earnings of those who completed a given course of education, compared with the average earnings of those who stopped just short of it, provide a valuation of the increase in productivity that the course confers. From this difference in earnings there must be deducted the contributions to the sinking fund required to replace the amount of the investment by the end of the student’s working life. The net yield so calculated can then be expressed as a rate of return on the investment. Estimates suggest that this rate of return is not less than that generally obtained from investment in physical capital. They also indicate that a great part of the productive resources of the economy consists in the education and training embodied in its labour force.
Though estimates of this kind are subject to some objections in principle, they do serve a useful purpose in stressing the potential of education and technical training in raising productivity and the risk of investing too little in them relative to other forms of investment. There is no less a risk of underinvestment in training in industry. The great obstacle there is that the employer is not assured of retaining the services of workers in whose training he has invested. Employers generally follow one of two strategies. They may provide training in-house and seek to retain the employee by inducements such as the prospect of career progression, pension entitlements, and other devices designed to encourage loyalty and an “organizational orientation.” Or, alternatively, employers may combine to establish industrywide training arrangements, sometimes with statutory support, thereby permitting ample skilled employees for easy movement between firms and more of a “market orientation” in their work forces.
The contribution of education and training to economic development is apparent in the changes that have taken place in the deployment of labour in the developing economies. When the deployment of the labour force is followed over a period of time, certain patterns appear. One of these arises from changes in methods of production. In farming, improvements in technique and equipment have made possible an increasing output from a declining labour force. In industry, the extension of research and development, the increased complexity of products and equipment, and new methods of collecting, storing, and processing information, along with other developments of management procedures, have all acted to increase the numbers of administrative, clerical, and technical workers relative to manual workers. A second course of change has affected occupations linked with particular industries, when those industries have contracted or expanded as compared with others. Coal mining and cotton textiles are examples of contraction. The service industries, on the other hand, have expanded: a greater proportion of household expenditure is devoted to services; education has extended; governments have provided more social services. A third course of change has its origins in relation to supply. Domestic services, for instance, have contracted because improved education and the opening up of other occupations to women has enabled many to take up work that they prefer. One general tendency is that as standards of living rise the service industries absorb a greater proportion of the labour force, because the rising demand for their output is not generally offset, as in manufacturing, by a progressive reduction in the amount of labour required to produce a given output.
The far-reaching changes that have come about in the relative numbers in different occupations and industries have called for corresponding changes in the training and allocation of young entrants to employment and for the movement of workers already in employment to other kinds of work and, often, other places. Though part of this adaptation has been unplanned and undirected, a number of governments have undertaken to foster the process of adaptation by a labour-market policy. One means of applying this policy is the provision of information to job seekers as to vacancies immediately available, and to workers at large as to the prospects and requirements of particular occupations. Labour-market policy also tries to guide entrants toward those occupations for which an expansion of demand is expected. One way of doing this is by promoting the training and retraining of selected persons for selected occupations. The function of retraining may be extended, as in Sweden, to offer all workers opportunities to qualify themselves for better-paid jobs throughout their working lives.
Wages may be fixed by collective bargaining between unions and management or by individual bargaining between worker and employer or simply by custom. When the status of wage earner became distinguished from other forms of labour, it was marked by the existence of an individual agreement about the rate of pay between wage earner and employer. The law still recognizes the individual contract of service even where the rate of pay has been fixed collectively. In earlier days there was often not even individual bargaining, because customary rates of pay prevailed that might be unchanged for many years at a time. In southern England, for instance, the prevailing rate for building craftsmen remained at sixpence a day for 120 years after 1412; for most of the 500 years after 1412, the building craftsman’s rate was half again as great as the labourer’s, or nearly so.
After industrialization had set in, custom continued in some measure to regulate rates of pay and to protect workers who entered into individual agreements. But its sway was much less extensive: from time to time rates changed. Although there was at first no reference to the cost of living, when price increases were general and sustained, there must have been informal understandings among the wage earners of a locality that each in making his own agreement would hold out for a higher rate. At times of increased demand for labour, moreover, the employer would have to offer a rate sufficient to attract and retain the wage earners against the competition of other employers. The necessity of holding needed labour is today the governing factor for employers who have workers with whom they do not negotiate either collectively or individually—generally clerical and administrative workers.
Frequently where the safeguards both of custom and of competition for workers have been missing, workers have felt the need to combine in order to bargain collectively. The force of custom declined as industrialization created new jobs and moved workers into new localities. Business fluctuations brought unemployment so that instead of employers competing for labour, workers were often competing for jobs. Thus industrialization has been universally associated with the rise of trade unions. (For a history of trade unionism, see organized labour.)
A main purpose of the trade union was to maintain a minimum rate of pay for its members, a purpose that led unions to extend or delimit both their membership and the number of employers with whom they bargained. The starting point was typically the club of craftsmen in a certain locality, concerned to ensure that none of its members worked for less than the rate it recognized from time to time as a minimum and to raise that rate when opportunity offered. By bringing all who worked in the same craft and district into membership, the club could reduce the risk of their bidding against each other; and if it could also limit the number entering the craft—by controlling the number of apprentices—it would be more likely to be able to raise the rates. However, since it was still likely to be subject to the competition of members of the same craft coming in from other places, and some of its own members might move in search of work, it had an interest in extending its coverage over all members of the craft throughout the labour market.
E&E Image Library/Heritage-ImagesIf the labour market was not coextensive with the product market, however, the union might still find itself exposed to the competition of workers at a distance if these worked at lower rates and so enabled their products to be sold at lower prices. Thus there was reason to extend the coverage of the union up to the boundary of the market for the product, though it was not practicable to organize workers in other countries. However, the union would see no advantage in bringing workers of other occupations into membership: on the contrary, it was felt that one could expect employers to concede a rise more readily if it would have to be paid to only a restricted membership. What has been said here of the craft union applies to all unions insofar as their aim is to maintain and raise the pay of members of a given occupation: the pursuit of that aim will lead them to embrace all the members of the occupation throughout the market for their product and to establish a basic rate throughout this bargaining area.
The reactions of employers both reinforce and modify this tendency. The ability of any one employer to pay a given rate depends largely on what rates are being paid by other employers who compete in the product market. When competition is close and labour costs are a substantial proportion of total costs, all employers selling in a given product market have a strong inducement to negotiate only through an employers’ association that embraces them all. Most employers’ associations are in fact industrywide, though some are limited to particular regions or sectors of an industry. Employers also know that what is conceded to employees in one occupation will commonly be demanded by those in others, unless they are divided by such a gulf as used to separate the manual from the clerical workers. Employers therefore commonly prefer to reach an agreement with all their workers in common and may make this a condition of negotiation. They thereby put pressure on occupational unions either to extend, amalgamate, and divide up until they form industrial unions each embracing all the manual workers in a given industry, as the Swedish unions have done, or to enter into confederations that provide all the unions having members in a given industry with a common front for the purpose of bargaining—the course followed by British unions.
Many semiskilled and unskilled workers are unable to seek bargaining advantage by restricting the membership of their unions to one defined occupation: they have to seek it rather through the accumulation of funds and the force of numbers—for them, “unity is strength.” Some unions have therefore adopted the principle of industrial unionism from the outset, in accordance with the tendency noted above toward establishing industrywide bargaining areas. Others, the general unions, have set out to recruit workers from every occupation and industry; but for bargaining purposes they have commonly had to act on behalf of their members in each industry separately. In any clash between the forces delimiting the bargaining area and those delimiting the trade union, the former generally prove the stronger.
Collective bargaining developed with the growth of trade unionism, especially from 1890 onward. It impinged upon labour markets in which the trend of money wages was upward: in years of good business, money wages generally rose, and though in the years of falling or low activity they were often cut, the cuts were generally smaller than the preceding rises had been.
A first effect of the extension of collective bargaining was to reduce pay differences, which had been large, between the wages a given grade of labour received at any one time in different regions and in different firms in the same region, and even between one worker and another under the same employer. The unions at first had to accept the prevailing regional differences, but their pressure to bring up the lower-paid regions has reinforced the effect of improved communications and information in reducing these differences greatly, especially since World War II. Assurance of “the rate for the job” raised the wages of particular groups or individuals who lacked access to alternative employers, either spatially or because of their lack of information and mobility. In general, the extension of collective bargaining brought about greater uniformity in the rates of pay received by workers of a given grade, and it did so by raising the lower rates.
Collective bargaining has also affected the forms in which improvements in pay are realized. It has borne particularly on those parts of the terms and conditions of employment that of their nature require to be regulated collectively. Chief among these are the hours of work. The extension of such fringe benefits as insurance and pensions paid for by the employer has also reflected trade union pressure.
Studies of differences between the movements of wages in unionized and nonunionized sectors of employment, especially in the United States, have brought out three other effects of the extension of collective bargaining. One is an impact and once-for-all effect: the introduction of collective bargaining has raised the wages of the workers concerned, relative to the general level prevailing around them, by some 10–15 percent. A second effect has been in the timing of changes: when wage rises were the order of the day, unionized workers achieved them earlier than nonunionized; and when the market was moving the other way, cuts of unionized workers were put off longer. When the cost of living has risen rapidly, as in wartime, the unionists’ ability to secure compensatory rises in money wages more promptly promoted the extension of unionism, especially among white-collar workers who had previously stood aloof from it. The third effect has been in the ability not only to defer wage cuts in depression but also to reduce their amount. In the United States, for example, the differential between wages in the unionized and nonunionized sectors was at its highest in the 1932 depression trough. A major effect on the general level of pay in terms of purchasing power and on its share in the product of industry seems to have stemmed from the resistance to pay cuts in the world economic depression of 1921: though pay was cut severely, often after protracted struggles, it could not be brought down as far as product prices had fallen, and in more than one country the distribution of the product of industry between pay and profit seems to have been permanently shifted.
By raising the pay of particular workers and by modifying fluctuations in the workers’ favour, over a period of time collective bargaining has made the total of pay higher than it would have been otherwise in the same conditions of the market. But the effect has been limited. Before World War II the movements of the general level of pay continued to depend mainly on market conditions, and the points at which the effects of collective bargaining can be distinguished clearly are fewer than might be expected. Collective bargaining provided the arena in which market forces took their effect, rather than a shelter from or alternative to them.
After World War II, however, the bearing of market forces on collective bargaining changed. One important influence was full employment (at least until the 1970s), but others were the increased importance of governments as employers, an apparent diminution of the significance of labour cost in product market competition, and, from the 1970s, the floating of national exchange rates. Employers gained the expectation that if they agreed to rises in pay that would exceed the rise in productivity, and so raise unit costs, they would still be able to preserve profit margins by raising the prices of their products—and do this without losing business, provided only that the initial rise in pay was not greater than that which was being conceded at the time by other employers. Some countries, such as Sweden and Germany, had employer organizations that were sufficiently united to resist these pressures. Other countries with little employer solidarity and highly fragmented bargaining, such as Britain and Italy, suffered persistently high cost inflation. Thus, the impact of trade unions cannot be assessed in isolation from that of employers.
A second limitation is that, even where collective bargaining has affected the movement of money wages, it has had only transient effect on the division of the national income between pay and profits. Whatever the course from time to time of rates of pay in money, the pay per person in real terms (i.e., in terms of purchasing power) has risen with remarkable regularity in much the same proportion as output per person, save for the one major exception of the displacement in favour of pay in the early 1920s. It appears that firms take advantage of opportunities to restore profit margins either by maintaining their selling prices while productivity rises or by raising those prices. A rise in real pay initially conferred by any one rise in money pay, therefore, will be reduced as the cost of living rises.
Limitations on the scope of bargaining are also suggested by theory. Collective bargaining can be seen as the reduction of two risks to which the worker is exposed through individual bargaining. There is first the risk that the worker will be merely one of a number of applicants for a single vacancy and that competition between them will force the pay down. Even as the sole applicant for the vacancy, there remains the second risk that the job will be offered only on terms that are unacceptable; in the event of failure to agree, going without the job will inflict more hardship on the worker than not filling the vacancy will on the firm. Bargaining through a trade union removes the first risk by ensuring that whichever applicant the firm engages it must pay not less than the union rate: in this sense the union exercises monopoly power. Membership in a trade union reduces the second risk by increasing the workers’ relative power to change proffered terms by withholding consent: in this sense the union confers bargaining power.
The scope of the monopoly power that the union exercises by maintaining the rate for the job may be seen by supposing that this rate is simply announced by the union, which leaves firms to hire as many or as few people as they choose at that rate. In deciding how high it can set the rate, the union must have regard for the consequences for employment. Firms may be able to alter the design of the product and the method of production so as to use less labour. To the extent that they cannot economize in the use of labour and that the pay of this labour enters into the total cost of production, a higher cost arises that firms may be obliged to pass on to their customers through higher product prices. The customers are then likely to buy less from them, especially if there is international competition in the markets for the product, and again employment will suffer. Thus a union that dictates its own terms is still subject to the constraint of the demand curve for the labour concerned. Equally, if the employers dictate the rate of pay, they could not set it so low as to make it impossible to attract and retain the required labour force: they would be subject to the constraint of the supply curve of the labour concerned.
APWhen neither side dictates the terms and an agreement must be negotiated, failure to agree results in a stoppage that causes losses to both parties. Attempts have been made to develop the pluses and minuses of these losses into a theory of bargaining. If, for example, it is assumed simply that the continuance of a stoppage progressively increases the wish of the parties to end it, and so causes firms to raise and the union to lower the rate at which each is prepared to settle, then the stoppage will end on the day when the two rates have been brought into equality. Further, if the parties agree in their forecasts of how the wish to settle will be affected by the continuance of the strike, they will find it in their interests to reach agreement on what would be the terms of the ultimate settlement without resorting to coercion by stoppage. A more elaborate theory has been developed in which each party is seen as weighing the cost to itself of a stoppage of given length, the benefit to it of a given concession by the other party, and its estimate of the effect of a given extension of the stoppage on the willingness of the other party to make a concession.
In practice much more is involved—internal political pressures, for instance, personal prestige, or the tactic of involving the government and public opinion. Many of the costs of a stoppage, moreover, are hard to express in terms of money. The above three variables must always figure prominently in the parties’ consideration. A stoppage is unlikely when on a consideration of these variables it appears that there will be no net gain; this situation exists when bargaining power is evenly balanced or when negotiation has already brought the parties’ positions close together. One party is likely to see a clear advantage in a stoppage only when market forces are working in its favour, and these will have told already in the course of negotiation. In particular the cost of a stoppage will be high to employers when they are busiest, whereas in a recession a stoppage may be a positive benefit to them. Insofar as bargaining power is thus conferred by market forces, it injects no distinct factor into the determination of rates of pay. Bargaining power may also be conferred by determination, loyalty, and leadership on either side. It has also been conferred on trade unions by the expectation, engendered among employers by the experience of sustained full employment, that rises in pay can be covered by higher prices so as to maintain profit margins without loss of business.
The productivity of a work force depends to a substantial extent upon the successful management of its payment system. Employees generally judge the “fairness” of their pay not by its absolute level but by its level relative to that of other employees, and in particular those with whom they are in close proximity. Their criteria for fairness are generally very conservative; the fair pay differential is the one to which they have become accustomed. A disturbed differential can be a source of discontent and lack of motivation. The technique usually used for managing the internal pay structure, as the relative pay of occupations within an organization is called, is job evaluation.
This term covers a range of procedures used to develop and maintain a consistent internal pay structure that is acceptable to the work force. Ranking methods use surveys of the work force’s preconceptions of fairness to arrive at a comprehensive pay structure. Analytic methods score the requirements of different jobs according to distinct criteria such as physical effort, mental skills, responsibility, and working conditions and then use weighted averages of these scores to establish the final pay structure. Job evaluation is typically participative, methodical, and ponderous. It offers a means to legitimate a pay structure and a procedure whereby changes in that structure can be negotiated and implemented. As such, it is a defense against the effect of disturbed pay differentials on employee motivation.
By contrast, there are a great variety of devices that use pay as a positive motivator. The most common method of payment is according to the duration of time worked—by hour, week, month, or year. But additional merit payments may be added on at the discretion of management as rewards for good performance. The hazard here is that, if employees feel the criteria on which these are based are inconsistent, the effect may be negative.
Salary structures are more formal devices that offer a range of pay levels for different job grades. The employee’s position within the range may depend upon managerial discretion, or it may be formalized into automatic annual increments. Promotion between job grades depends upon criteria over which managerial discretion has stronger incentive effects.
Payment by results most commonly relates money payment to physical output for a part of the wage. This may be done for an individual as piecework or for a group of workers. In order that the incentive effect be seen as fair for employees engaged on different tasks, it is necessary to develop common standards to provide the same rewards to comparable increases in effort. The work study techniques devised for this use a combination of accurate timing and the observer’s judgment of the effort being applied over many repetitions of the job to arrive at a standard time, which is then directly comparable with the standard times for other jobs. This provides a basis for incentive payment, with the same bonus being earned by workers who complete their different tasks in the same percentage briefer than their standard time. In practice, there is ample opportunity for dispute and for the emergence of contentious anomalies, particularly as a result of minor changes in production technology. The incentive effect usually fades with time, and most payment-by-results systems have a limited life.
Payment related to corporate performance has become increasingly popular since the 1970s. Rather than linking employees’ bonuses to their own performance, it is tied to profits or some other indicator of the state of the company. The main advantage of this is didactic; it is believed to increase loyalty and to educate the work force about the commercial circumstances within which the company operates. For similar reasons many governments have encouraged employee share ownership schemes.
In the United States, Japan, Great Britain, and a growing number of other countries, the scope of pay bargaining is often no greater than a single employer or even a single plant. This has the advantage that the wage structure and incentive system can be closely tailored to a broader package that includes training, motivation, and career development. It requires the employer to sever links with the multiemployer industrywide agreements that have often prevailed previously. It also implies that the trade union unit of organization is focused on the single firm as well—as a “local” in the United States, as an “enterprise union” in Japan, or as a “joint shop stewards’ committee” in Britain. Such organizations enjoy considerable or complete autonomy from the wider union movement, making them in some respects weaker and more pliable.
Single-employer bargaining is a strategy that offers a firm greater freedom to manipulate the productivity of its work force by isolating its trade union (if any) and developing organization-oriented attitudes and company-specific training and job descriptions. It does not, however, provide the employer with any influence over the generally prevailing level of pay settlements. This is offered by the alternative multiemployer strategy, which also permits a more market-oriented approach to labour with industrywide wage and training agreements. Multiemployer strategies do not imply complete uniformity of payment across all firms: in practice they tend to have discretion to vary the agreement somewhat at plant level. In some countries this is a fairly disciplined two-tier arrangement; in others, local bargaining pressures cause the plant-level element to dominate in what becomes known as wage drift.
Governments have intervened in three ways to enforce minimum rates for workers who lacked both the protection of trade unions and competition between employers for their services and whose wages in consequence were regarded as needlessly low. One way has been to provide by law that “recognized terms and conditions of employment,” such as those reached by collective bargaining for workers of a particular description, shall be applied to all others engaged in the same kind of work. A second way, followed by the United Kingdom since 1909 and by a number of state legislatures in the United States, has been to set up boards of representatives of the workers concerned and their employers, together with independent members, charged with determining rates of pay and hours of work that are legally binding as minimal on all employers within the scope of the board. The board discusses and negotiates wage claims in much the same way as in collective bargaining, albeit if the parties cannot reach agreement, the independent members have a deciding vote.
These two forms of intervention are calculated to raise the pay of particular groups of unorganized workers only to the extent that it would be raised by the extension of collective bargaining to cover them. A third way, followed notably by the United States in its Fair Labor Standards Act since 1938, has been to specify by statute the actual minimum wage applicable to wide categories of employment—the amount set being such that only a relatively small number of workers, namely the lowest paid, are immediately affected. When such measures were first proposed, critics argued that they would only result in the workers they were intended to protect losing their jobs. In some cases this has happened, as when the United States minimum wage was applied to the needleworkers of Puerto Rico. More often, however, the workers concerned were receiving lower pay than a competitive market would have afforded them—that is, if they had had more access to alternative employers. Minimum-wage measures tend to discourage labour-intensive methods of production, so that while they may cost jobs in the short term, they tend to force employers into more advanced production technologies, which create greater long-term growth and employment potential.
Another way of regulating rates of pay is a by-product of arbitration systems set up originally as a means of avoiding strikes and lockouts. In Australia it has become the practice, accepted by both employers and trade unions, to have the main proportions of the wage structure and the movements of the general level of wages determined by the awards of arbitrators to whom these issues are submitted in the form of disputes. In setting rates for particular occupations or industries relatively to others, arbitrators must in practice have regard to what is acceptable to the parties; for even where arbitration is compulsory, its awards would cease to be observed if either party had cause to believe that the terms of the awards were persistently less favourable than it could obtain by its own bargaining power. In regulating the movement of the general level of pay, the arbitrators have more discretion; but the government, and the employers insofar as they meet international competition at home and abroad, will make them aware of the effects of the awards on the level of domestic costs and prices and on the balance of payments.
Under full employment the rise in effective rates of pay has generally been inflationary in that it has exceeded the rise of productivity. The consequent rise in costs and prices has at times been disturbing domestically and has been particularly embarrassing to governments that face difficulties in balancing their external payments. Governments in general have been unwilling to check the rise of inflation by applying fiscal and monetary restraints to the degree that unemployment would be substantially raised. In the belief that at least part of the rise is due not to excess purchasing power but to the pushing up of costs and prices, governments have appealed to those who make decisions affecting labour costs and product prices to moderate the rise in pay and profits. Some governments have formulated norms that would, in theory, keep the general level of prices constant and would keep the general level of pay rising only at the rate of the expected rise in productivity—allowing, of course, for specific exceptions. Agencies have been set up to apply these principles, but usually only by way of investigation, assessment, and advice. Governments have preferred to rely on the acceptance of the policy in principle by employers and trade unions, and on their efforts to secure its observance by their affiliates. Even where statutory powers of control exist, they have usually been kept in reserve. During times of recession, governments have generally suspended their efforts to enforce a national incomes policy.
Systematic differences are found in the average earnings obtained in different regions, industries, and occupations. The average earnings prevailing in different regions of a country show a considerable range between the highest and the lowest, even when the same procedures for fixing rates apply everywhere. Much of the dispersion is due to differences in the localization of industry: if the relatively high-paying iron and steel industry, for instance, is concentrated in a particular region, then the average pay of the region will be raised to that extent. But regional differences also exist because work of the same kind frequently commands different rates of pay in different regions. Such differences are sometimes necessary to maintain the balance of payments between regions; they may also be in some measure a legacy of history and are likely to be reduced as communications improve and labour becomes more mobile. As noted above, this process of reduction has been expedited by trade union pressures.
Average earnings also vary from industry to industry, and the considerable range that appears can again be attributed largely to differences in the composition of the labour force: an industry such as printing, which by the nature of its processes employs a high proportion of skilled workers, will on that account alone show higher average earnings than, say, the textile industry, which employs a higher proportion of the semiskilled. The similarity between the structure of earnings by industry in different countries—with printing, iron and steel, and engineering near the top, and textiles and food processing low down—is thus attributable to common processes requiring similar compositions of the labour force.
This occupational structure, therefore, presents the main object of economic analysis. International comparisons show that the ranking order of the rates of pay prevailing in different occupations is similar in different countries, but that the range, whether between professional and manual occupations or, within the manual, between the skilled and unskilled, is much wider in economies at an early stage of development and diminishes in the course of development. These are the principal observations to be accounted for by any theory of the differences in the rates of pay that different kinds of work command. Several such theories have been propounded.
One theory stresses the link between occupations and their status in the community, some having higher status than others. The community believes, according to this theory, that pay should correspond to status; and the rate of pay for each occupation is assigned to it by common consent, reflecting the place it occupies in the hierarchy of esteem. The implications are that the community’s discretion is not as a rule subject to other factors such as the market forces of supply and demand and that, if people came to make less distinction of status between occupations, then the rates of pay for different jobs could be more nearly equal. Doubtless, many people do think in the way the theory supposes, feeling it anomalous, for example, when an occupation that is commonly accorded a higher status than another ceases to command a higher rate of pay. But the correspondence between status and pay is ambiguous; it is not clear to what extent pay is made to fit the status and to what extent status follows from pay. Moreover, the occupational pay structures of different countries show more similarity than do their social values. Nor does the theory explain why the pay structure has generally become compressed in the course of development, and the ranking order sometimes inverted, as when some clerical occupations drop below some manual ones—changes that can otherwise be explained as the effect of extended education in increasing the relative supply of more qualified labour.
If the theory is not acceptable as an explanation of the pay structure as a whole, it does call attention to a factor that appears to affect parts of that structure. One of these parts is that of the higher administrative posts. It is generally accepted that any such post must carry a higher salary than any post below it in the chain of command; and when this chain is long, as it is in a big corporation, the salaries set for the posts in it, and the high level reached at the top, are to be accounted for by this principle.
The same theory also suggests a cause of prevailing differences between men’s and women’s rates of pay. Some women’s work is different in kind from men’s irrespective of the fact that it is done by women; and, where men and women both do work of the same description, some disabilities attaching to women as employees, in particular the likelihood that they will not stay in the job as long as men, may make them worth less to the employer. There are many jobs, however, in which these considerations do not apply and in which there is no difference in the productivity of men and women adequate to account for the actual difference between men’s and women’s rates. The difference seems attributable rather to customary attitudes and valuations—in particular, the assumption that women’s productivity is lower in all jobs and the belief that pay should be proportioned to need (women workers generally needing less than the man who has a family to support). If such factors as these account for differences in pay between men and women where there is no corresponding difference in the work they do or the efficiency with which they do it, one may speculate that the same factors account for some part of the pay differential where the two kinds of job are distinct.
A second theory lays its stress on power: the ways in which organized groups can protect and advance the pay of their members. Any group that restricts entry into its occupation can keep its labour relatively scarce and thereby support the rate of pay that that kind of labour commands. The discussion above of the economic effects of the trade union indicated the circumstances in which a trade union would be able to raise the relative pay of its members by the exercise of monopoly and bargaining power. The general increase in the pay of the less skilled relative to that of the skilled manual worker has been attributed in part at least to the increased unionization of the unskilled. Evidently, policies of organized groups will account for some part at least of the position of particular occupations in the pay structure. Power can also be endowed by management in the form of managerial authority, and at least a part of a hierarchy of pay within an organization is likely to be an imposed means of distinguishing and upholding the strata of the organization’s internal power structure.
A third theory treats the differences in pay for different jobs as corresponding to differences in their content or requirements. The simplest form of this theory was embodied in the labour theory of value, whether in the system of Adam Smith or of Karl Marx, by the assumption that different kinds of labour can be reduced to different quantities of “homogeneous labour time,” and that rates of pay are then simply proportional to those quantities. Job evaluation, discussed above, purports to condense the varied requirements of each job to a single figure in a common scale in order that the ranking order of the rates of pay of the jobs may be brought into conformity with that of those figures. But the assumption that, if two articles are priced in the same currency, they must contain quantities of a common substance is gratuitous. The impossibility of establishing the existence of such a substance and measuring the amount of it in any article drives both the labour theory of value and job evaluation into the circular argument of inferring the job content from the rate of pay and then explaining the rate of pay by the job content.
The foregoing directs attention to the supply price of labour to the job—the rate that must be paid if employers are to be able to attract and retain the quantity of labour that they wish to employ at that rate. Entry into an occupation generally imposes certain monetary costs; there may also be subjective costs, for example, in the effort of concentration required by preparation for examinations. The exercise of any occupation may be attended by disadvantages that require monetary compensation or may provide satisfactions and amenities that make workers willing to accept lower pay. For each occupation the various costs and benefits can be set off against the pay, and entrants will choose the one in which the prospective balance of advantage seems greatest. If more workers are to be attracted to and retained in a given occupation with unchanged conditions on the side of supply, the rate of pay in that occupation must be raised relative to others. An extension of supply will work to the opposite effect: for instance, if there is more public provision for secondary and tertiary education, and if rising standards of living enable more families to bear the costs of training, then a given number of workers will come to be available in a given occupation at a lower relative rate of pay. Here is to be found the reason for the occupational pay structure extending over a smaller range in developed than in poor countries and for the reduction in the margins for skill and the relative rate of pay for clerical work in the developed economies during the present century.
A number of considerations thus indicate that changes in the supply of labour influence its relative wage, although it is quite another thing to affirm the general theory of prices and assert that the rate of pay in any occupation tends to equality with the long-run supply price of labour to that occupation. The highly subjective nature of many of the costs and benefits involved in labour supply, and their dependence upon socially determined norms, strips the notion of a long-run supply price of any practical meaning. Nevertheless, in the absence of an extension of supply, a fall in the relative rate of pay of an occupation will bring a check to recruitment, followed by some withdrawal to other jobs of those already in the occupation. A rise in the relative rate of pay needs longer to take effect where proficiency takes long to acquire. Some types of proficiency may be limited by nature, and the rise in the rate of pay that follows on an extension of demand for them constitutes an economic rent—i.e., a payment that is not required to maintain supply. In general, however, given time, the number of proficient workers available to follow a given occupation will be increased by a rise in the relative rate of pay it offers.
The complex character of labour as a commodity is nowhere more evident than in the relationship between pay and productivity. According to conventional economic theory, productivity should be the straightforward determinant of the employer’s demand for labour. An employer who wishes to maximize profits will continue to recruit only up to the point at which the extra output gained from another worker equals the wage that worker is to be paid. This theory of marginal productivity lies at the heart of the orthodox economic theory of labour.
The value of the theory, however, has come under question. Empirically minded economists note the profound difficulty of applying the theory when the productivity of individual labour in most organizations is unmeasurable and wage structures are internally connected. Aware of its weak analytic power, contemporary theorists in the orthodox tradition have suggested minor elaborations. Noting a number of apparently discordant empirical and institutional features of the labour market, they have tried to bring them into the scope of formal economic analysis. Thus, taking the finding that local labour markets support a wide range of wage rates for a given grade of labour, search theory has tried to explain the phenomenon as a product of imperfections in information about available jobs and the consequent cost of searching. The same phenomenon is addressed by efficiency wage theories, which propose that the higher-paid occupants of a job grade are also achieving above-average productivity. Implicit contract theories, noting the considerable duration of most labour contracts, account for it as a necessary cost in the effort to overcome the difficulty of monitoring an employee’s performance. That wages do not fall to levels that might, according to orthodox theory, eliminate unemployment is explained by insider–outsider theorists as a reflection of collusion between self-interested parties—in particular, those possessing jobs.
Such theorizing is promising, but it has shown relatively little explanatory power. It remains limited by a highly constraining view of the worker as an individual of purely rational motives and by an inability to grasp the significance of collective norms and behaviour in labour matters. It fails to explore the consequences of a world of imperfect product and labour markets, and its blindness to the open-ended character of the employment relationship prevents it from analyzing the significance of the varied institutional devices with which managers try to elicit productivity.
Something can be learned from the way in which employers manage productivity in practice. Employers pay great attention to internal pay structures, using job evaluation and other techniques to assure a stable and controlled structure of status within the work force. They give less detailed attention to what other employers are paying, so long as they keep the general level of pay increases broadly in line. They generally use specific incentive schemes more to generate an atmosphere of cooperation and flexibility than to make people work harder. Improvement in labour productivity comes overwhelmingly from technological change, requiring employees not to work harder but to work differently. The stress of such change to the employee is essentially temporary. It involves working with different workmates, facing the daunting challenge of learning a new skill, mourning for the lost opportunity to perform a skill of which one was once proud, and so on. Managers typically respond to the stress of meeting technological change with a temporary payment, although it may not seem temporary at the time. They may, for instance, introduce a new skill grade to match the new technique but remove it in a grade restructuring after a few years when memories of the upheaval have dimmed.
Employers are primarily concerned with unit costs, which involve both absolute wage levels and labour productivity. This concern arises from the pressures of the product market, which tend to override opportunities to pay what the labour market will bear. Employees, by contrast, think primarily of relative wages, especially very local relativities, and have only a fitful, vague, and temporary concern with their own productivity. They also place a relatively low priority on the opportunities offered by alternative wage levels in the labour market. It is in meeting this asymmetry of aspirations that the successful management of productivity lies, requiring constant tactical skill and personal attention on the part of employers.
Such management implies the antithesis of marginal-productivity theory for two reasons. The first is that in a complex organization the productivity of the individual means nothing, and the productivity of the overall organization means everything. The second is that, in a world of imperfect markets, expecting prices to approach equilibrium in just one—the labour market—misses the important fact that competition is a total process, pursued on many fronts, such as design, marketing, and labour productivity—of which a competitive price for labour is only one.
Labour is by any standards an exceptional commodity. The quality of it is molded by its social context, and it is able to influence the shape of its own markets. Only a multidisciplinary analytic approach can unravel this complexity. The competitive forces of the economists’ marketplace do indeed have a substantial impact upon the price of labour, although through more than just the specific market for labour itself. The level at which these forces are most evident is at that of broad aggregates and long time spans.
A wage is a price, and the rise of the general level of wages or rates of pay in the course of time has, to some extent, been part of the long-term rise in the general level of all prices—that is, of the cumulative depreciation of the purchasing power of money, largely attributable to increases in its quantity. In another way, however, the movements of rates of pay have been an independent cause of the rising trend of prices. At times those rates rose in common with prices under the pull of monetary demand (in times of inflation, during war, or in the rising phase of the trade cycle), but when the demand fell off they were resistant to cuts; and though they were cut somewhat, they commonly remained at a higher level than when the preceding rise began. A graph of product prices shows big falls as well as big rises, and sometimes a falling trend persisting for many years together; but a graph of money wage rates is more like a flight of steps. This characteristic of wage movements puts a floor under prices and provides a higher starting point for the next upward movement, so that the fluctuations of monetary demand impose a rising trend on prices. In addition, the analysis of cost inflation under full employment, noted above, has shown that when employers generally expect demand to be sustained, rises in pay may occur in the absence of excess demand, thereby initiating rises in prices; and it is possible that the same process may have played some part in the rising phase of the trade cycles of earlier years.
The rise of real earnings may be traced by comparing the movements of earnings in money with those of an index number of the prices of the articles on which pay is typically expended. Such comparisons indicate that between 1860 and 1960 the real earnings of manual workers rose fourfold in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom; more than fivefold in the United States; and more than sevenfold in Sweden. In considering the standard of living attendant on these movements, it is necessary also to take account of the prevailing reduction in the size of the family, the complex effects of urbanization on the amenities of life, the effects of changed techniques and deployment between occupations on the strains and satisfactions experienced in work, and the reduction of hours of work. The last element has been extensive: it appears that down to World War II the wage earners of the five countries mentioned, save the United States, gave up from a third to a half of the potential increase in annual purchasing power in favour of a shorter working week and longer vacations.
To the extent that real earnings are measured simply by the quantity of consumables that money earnings will buy, their rise has depended on three factors: productivity, or the output per worker in terms of his own product; the share of this product that accrues to the worker; and the rate of exchange between the worker’s own product and the goods and services he buys. In the industrialized countries, the last factor has presented itself largely in the form of the terms of trade between manufactured products and primary products, especially foodstuffs: real earnings have risen faster or slower according as a representative consignment of manufacturers may be exchanged, at the prices of the day, for a greater or smaller quantity of foodstuffs and raw materials. There have also been variations from time to time in the second factor: the share of the product accruing to the worker. The effect of the last two factors, however, has been small in comparison with that of the first, the rise of productivity. The salient finding from the statistical record of the last hundred years is that real earnings per worker have risen very nearly in the same proportion as output per worker.