Can we tell whether Arch raised wages?

Abstract

T he i870s English 'revolt of the field' sought, unsurprisingly, to raise 1 wages. Past historians have been vague and/or in dispute as to whether it succeeded. Now Boyer and Hatton claim that their use of superior data together with a cross-section regression model enables them to test the 'effects of unions on agricultural wages' 'once other possible determinants . . are taken into account'.' Their data are: farm wage returns in Wilson Fox's Second Report; a series of carpenters' wage rates in I3 English cities2 to serve as an urban control; and membership figures for agricultural trade unions. On the basis of two types of analysis, regional (for the i870s) and allEngland (for the i866-i903 long-run), plus alternative dummy variables, they conclude that: 'From i870 to i875 . . . agricultural unionism raised the average farm wage by 2.3 to 3.0 per cent';4 or, on the basis of allEngland analysis, by 6 per cent as between i87i and I876,5 with the possibility6 that, had union membership remained at its average i872-6 level, the long-run increase would have been 9 or ii per cent. 'Between i875 and i88o the collapse of unionism reduced the average farm wage by between i.8 and i.9 per cent', leaving 'no significant effect of unionism on farm wages remaining by i88o';7 or, on the all-England basis, 'in i88o ... farm wages were [from 'over 5'] to [nearly] 4 per cent . . . higher than they would have been in the absence of unionization', and in i890 still between 2 and 3 per cent higher;8 further, though most calculations suggest that changes in union membership had 'an insignificant effect [on agricultural wages] after i884', one simulation sees 'the union wage effect' increase 'from i890 to a second peak at 4 per cent in i893' (pp. 328-30). Two points will be observed: the calculations are clearly subject to an appreciable margin of error; and the wage effects attributed to agricultural unionism are not large, and could easily be submerged (in either direction) by uncertainties in the evidence.