Full Employment on Trial: A Case Study of British Experience

Abstract

British post-war experience constitutes the best case yet available for study of a conscious government policy of combining full employment and price stability within the framework of free collective bargaining. In this paper, a few of the unresolved problems inherent in a full-employment economy are examined in the light of British experience. The hard core of the problem of full-employment price instability is the difficulty of restraining demands for higher wages, not because labour is less “responsible” than other sectors of the economy, but because wages constitute the largest single item both of costs and of income. It is therefore interesting to determine whether British governments have produced a wage policy which could compress wage demands within the limits say, of the productivity of labour. Has any principle (other than uninhibited self-interest) provided a new orientation to the process of collective bargaining? Has collective bargaining with a fully employed labour force in Britain disturbed the traditional constancy of distributive shares to capital and labour and if so, what was the impact of this, in turn, on economic reconstruction? What, in general, has been the rationale of trade unions in the environment of full employment? Britain has attempted to discover answers to these problems. Only by knowing these answers can we intelligently appraise the policy of maintaining full employment.