I was just called by a journalist asking about the history of Wage Councils.
I pointed them at a 1995 House of Commons research paper that includes the following on the Trades Councils that were superseded by Wage Councils in 1945:
Minimum wage legislation in Britain can be traced back to Winston Churchill's Trade Boards Act 1909. This set up Trade Boards to regulate the pay of workers in industries notorious for the employment of cheap labour. In his often-quoted speech on Second Reading of the Bill, Winston Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, explained that the Boards were necessary to ensure that workers received a living wage in industries where the bargaining strength of employers greatly outweighed that of employees:
It is a serious national evil that any class of His Majesty's subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions. It was formerly supposed that the working of the laws of supply and demand would naturally regulate or eliminate that evil................Where in the great staple trades in the country you have a powerful organisation on both sides, where you have responsible leaders able to bind their constituents to their decision, where that organisation is conjoint with an automatic scale of wages or arrangements for avoiding a deadlock by means of arbitration, there you have a healthy bargaining which increases the competitive power of the industry, enforces a progressive standard of life and the productive scale, and continually weaves capital and labour more closely together. But where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes the trade up as a second string, his feebleness and ignorance generally renders the worker an easy prey to the tyranny of the masters and middle-men, only a step higher up Research Paper 95/7 the ladder than the worker, and held in the same relentless grip of forces - where those conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.
[HC Deb 28 April 1909, c 388]
So we have to blame that notorious left winger Winston Churchill for this idea. He was a Liberal at the time.
That should go down well.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Brilliant!
Like many politicians from across the political spectrum of the time, what Churchill had seen and was not afraid to admit was the failure of free market ideology and the consequences of that failure in terms of human suffering. What we now have is a political class, most of them Tories, but a good number in Labour and Lib Dems, and a business elite, entirely happy with leaving the ‘evils’ of our neoliberal system unregulated. Indeed, in many cases they are celebrated (as George Monbiot points out in relation to Liam Fox). The fundamental difference here is that Churchill understood that as a public servant his duty was first and foremost to promote and deliver what was in the public interest. Whereas most contemporary politicians – particularly when in government – now follow the mantra that public service means using that position to advance the interests of the commercial sector and the 1% in the knowledge that when the time comes they’ll be rewarded accordingly.
It’s astonishing how far backwards we have gone
Churchill wanted to end an abuse
How rarely do we hear that now
when I heard George Osborn talk about “people choosing not to work” at certain wage levels, my supposition was that he got his reality from books and theoretical concepts rather the world of experience. It may explain the indifference to people’s deprivation that he and people like Fox show.
Didn’t Boris Johnson write a biography of Winston Churchill? Conveniently forgotten.
Without decent wages, how can you have a strong economy?
By replacing wages with debt, you reduce disposable income as servicing debt reduces disposable income – how can you have a strong economy?
Without decent wages allowing you to spend and save, how can you have a strong economy (because there is less risk when there is no debt)?
I like it. As I always say, send in the cavalry, I once played rugger against the 4H when Churchill was PM. Apparently as Colonel in Chief he had an abiding interest in the men and their welfare.