The Independent Members of British Wages Councils and Boards

Abstract

LTHOUGH voluntary collective bargaining settles the wages A and conditions of most employees, about four and a half million w Xof theml are protected by legislation which guarantees them a legal minimum wage and other conditions of employment; about one in five of all people in employment has a legal minimum rate of pay set by a statutory body, and enforced if necessary by the criminal as well as the civil law. Wages Councils and Catering Wages Boards, which together with the Agricultural Wages Boards are the instruments of statutory wage regulation, make proposals affecting wage rates and other conditions to the Minister of Labour: he either accepts them and issues a Wages Regulation Order, or occasionally sends them back for reconsideration. The two Agricultural Wages Boards, for England and Wales, and for Scotland, issue their own Wages Regulation Orders without reference to a Minister. Most of the wage-earners covered by the legislation receive more than the legal minima, and many are also covered by voluntary collective agreements, but beneath these actual rates and voluntary agreements are the enforceable legal minima. 'Today the ostensible object [of statutory wage regulation] is to make good any gaps left in the voluntary arrangements',2 but the gaps are considerable ones and the Wages Councils and Boards which fill them are more than an appendage of a predominantly voluntary system of wage settlement. The chief distinctive feature o£ the working of the Councils and Boards is the inclusion of independent persons among their members. Each is made up of equal numbers of members representing employers and workers, together with a number of independent members.3 Thls tripartite composition was laid down in the Trade Boards Act of I909 and has been continued in all subsequent legislation. R. H. Tawney, in the first study to be made of the working of the Trade Boards, stated: 'It is scarcely too much to say that the Appointed NIembers are the