EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Charting the coverage of collective pay setting institutions 1895-1990

S. Milner

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Fewer than 50% of British employees now have their pay and conditions affected by collective pay setting institutions - collective bargaining or wage councils. This paper provides an historical context to the current picture of a decollectivised Britain, constructing a time series on coverage from 1895-1990. Extant estimates and sources of coverage data are presented and discussed alongside estimates drawn from a source used only sparingly before now - the number of workers affected by changes in wage rates of national agreements or wage orders. The various manipulations required to convert these data into coverage estimates are detailed at length. The recent decline in collective bargaining coverage is the longest period ever recorded and has been noticeably steeper than the fall in union density, such that the proportion of British workers covered in lower now than in the 1940s. Given the abolition of wages councils in 1993, collective pay setting machinery now affects the pay and conditions of less workers than it did in the 1930s.

JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 1994-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20801/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:20801

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:20801