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Winners and Losers: Pay Patterns in the 1970s
Abstract
In this report, published by PEP and Sussex University's Centre for Contemporary European Studies, the authors hope that union leaderships will again be able to exercise enough authority to create a unified strategy, despite current contrary strong pressures from sections of their membership. This strategy would consist not just in overall pay restraint nor in trying to restore ‘traditional’ differentials, but in moving towards a sensible policy and machinery for distribution of pay between competing groups.
Prices and Incomes Policy was once a key tool of British economic management. Thus, in 1966, one could find William Brown, fresh from Oxford, engaged at Labour’s new National Board for Prices and Incomes (NBPI) in a ‘very British attempt at trying to deal with a rather bewildering problem, by actually going out and finding evidence’.1 By 1973, that great Tory fixture Arthur Cockfield was complaining to Heath that his extensive powers at the Price Commission were still not strong enough.2 In any conventional reading, Prices and Incomes Policy would surely be a central plank in the post-war settlement. It combined the belief (or illusion) that governments could manage the economy with the imperative of doing so in conjunction with the trade unions. It also represented, at least tacitly, an attempt to direct the economy in a way compatible with equitable outcomes, in particular full employment: inflationary pressures were to be controlled so as to avoid placing strain on the goal of full employment.
In the previous two chapters we looked in depth at movements in the pay of, first, manual and then non-manual workers. We have seen how the pay of both groups of workers has grown over the period and examined the interdependence and differences between the pay of similar occupational groups within different parts of the public sector.
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