British labour statistics; Historial abstract 1886 - 1968

Since the middle of the nineteenth century there has been a continuous development of arrangements under which wage rates and other conditions of employment have been fixed by voluntary agreements made between employers or associations of employers and work people's organisations. To-day, national collective agreements apply to about 101 million wage-carners.

In some industries, where adequate voluntary negotiating machinery did not develop, there has been state regulation of minimum rates of wages. The Trade Boards Act of 1909 initially applied to four trades. Others were added and in 1945 the Trade Boards became known as Wages Councils. In 1968 in Great Britain there were 54 Wages Councils, set up under the Wages Councils Act, 1959. They covered an estimated 3 million workers, chiefly employed in road haulage, retail distribution and the catering trades. In addi tion agricultural workers have their wages regulated by the Agricultural Wages Boards set up under the Agricultural Wages Acts, one for England and Wales and one for Scotland. This means that in all some 14 million out of a total of about 16 million wage-earners are covered by either national collective agreements or statutory Wages Regula tion Orders. The present volume is essentially an abstract of the statistics which have appeared in the above publications, together with the associated reports on particular surveys, commencing with the first earnings survey in 1886. How ever, 1886 has not been treated as a completely rigid starting date: several of the series which have been reproduced from the early Abstracts contain statistics for still earlier years. Nor, in cases where useful supplementary material was known to be available, have the tables been strictly confined to those already published in the GAZETTE. In order to make the historical abstract as complete as possible, several tables have been reproduced from other sources and a number of new tables have been compiled to fill various gaps.