Low Pay, Wage Relativities, and Labour’s First Attempt to Introduce a Statutory National Minimum Wage in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This article highlights the distributive considerations behind the longstanding opposition of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) to the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage in the United Kingdom. Possibly because of its strong preoccupation with class divisions, the existing literature on labor market development has failed to fully recognize the importance of these considerations in shaping the TUC’s longstanding opposition to statutory intervention to assist the low paid in the United Kingdom. In much of this literature, it is argued that this opposition mainly resulted from union fears that statutory intervention would undermine their function and with that their ability to attract union members. This article casts doubts on the importance of this. The analysis shows that Britain’s occupationally organized labor unions consistently opposed any measure that would reduce the wage advantage of their members over lower paid workers, and illustrates how this mattered to the persistence of poverty in employment and the failure of postwar attempts to improve matters for the lowest paid in the United Kingdom.