Explaining Post-war Wage Compression

Abstract

One of the main problems confronting labor unions during wage

bargaining is how to deal with the conflicting demands of different

groups of workers over the division of labor market earnings. This

article explains how their internal organizational blueprint determines how they deal with this and criticizes the scholarly preoccupation with union density and wage bargaining centralization as explanatory variables for cross-national and temporal variation in wage inequality. It does so based on a critical analysis of collective bargaining in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom during the first four decades of the postwar period.