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In the analysis of the role of trade unions in wage determination, British economists in the last decade or so have concentrated their efforts on the part played by unions in wage inflation. This paper is addressed to a somewhat different question: by how much have trade unions in Britain raised the pay of unionized manual workers relative to the pay of non-unionized manual workers? The derived estimates pertain not to a single occupation or industry, but are an economy-wide average and so, no doubt, conceal some important differences within particular sectors. Nevertheless an examination of the British experience affords a valuable opportunity to consider whether the institutional setting of collective bargaining acts as a neutral factor in determining the influence of unions on relative wages. Many observers have drawn attention to the existence in the high employment postwar British economy of two systems of industrial relations; in its Report, the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations (1968) presents a cogent, if rather strong, summary description of the characterization of the two systems. On the one hand, there are those industries where average hourly earnings (net of overtime pay) do not differ substantially from the wage rates negotiated between representatives of the employers and of the unions at the industry level. On the other hand, there are those industries (the large engineering sector being the standard example) in which actual hourly earnings are considerably in excess of the industry-wide wage rate agreements and it is in these industries that, as far as the pay of manual workers is concerned, bargaining at the plant or firm level takes on paramount importance. These differences in the industrial relations systems may imply corresponding differences in the opportunities available to unions to secure an hourly earnings differential for their members vis--vis non-union workers. To investigate this possibility, a... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article chronicles industrial relations in the Great Britain between January to April 1969. During the first quarter of 1969 the average total register of unemployed in Great Britain showed a fall compared with the first quarter of 1968. On a seasonally adjusted basis unemployment in the first quarter of 1969 averaged 479 thousand as compared with 510 thousands for the corresponding period of 1968. Since August 1968 unemployment had been on a downward trend and this continued until February. In March the trend was reversed when the fall in wholly unemployed amounted to 17,000 fewer than the estimated normal seasonal fall at that time of the year. In percentage terms the average wholly unemployed in Great Britain showed a 0' 1 fall over the average figure for the last quarter of 1968. The Index of basic weekly rates of wages for manual workers in Great Britain continued to rise in the first quarter of 1969. This rise was smaller than in the last quarter of 1968 when the December figure showed the effects of the new engineering agreement coining into operation in that month. The rise was small in comparison with that of the first quarter of 1968 when the January figure showed a steep increase over the December 1967 figures.

This article attempts to indicate both the diversity of substance and the diversity of approach, which characterize sociological studies of blue-collar workers in Great Britain. The discussion hinges on four perspectives, which may be distinguished in the relevant sociological literature: 1. Institutional Empiricism; 2. Systems Analysis; 3. Social Action Studies; 4. Reference Group Analysis. These perspectives are sufficiently clear to justify organizing the discussion around them, but it should be emphasized that they are not necessarily to be seen as mutually exclusive categories Sociologists see in fact that sometimes two perspectives may be consciously utilized by an author in a mutually supportive way. They further see that sometimes the answer to a problem of research strategy posed from the standpoint of different perspectives may lead in practice to an unexpected convergence as between different writers. What has to be recognized here is that the occupational community serves as an important membership and reference group in explaining the continued working class identification. To describe these workers as privatized would, therefore, be misleading. This suggests that the occupation itself needs to be treated as a variable in assessing the extent to which one can talk of normative convergence between the working and middle classes. It provides an analytical point of contact with the work of Scott et al who, as was noted above, treated occupation as a social system variable in their attempts to explain blue-collar worker behavior.