Wages

Abstract

Nationalisation created a wages problem. Before nationalisation the structure of wages might be defended as the outcome of the distribution of labour and capital. Highly mechanised and highly productive pits in the East Midlands could give higher wages than the more labour-intensive, low-productive pits of South Wales, Scotland and Lancashire. And it could also be argued it was necessary to maintain these differences so as to encourage an expansion of the industry in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire and a contraction elsewhere. Hence many of the apparent irrationalities and anomalies which led to differences of earnings for workers doing a similar job or different jobs could be rationalised. After nationalisation such arguments carried less conviction. The common ownership of all capital and the common employment of all miners suggested a more egalitarian sharing of income, and wage differences had to be defended as fair as well as efficient. Furthermore, the very workings of the market were themselves subjected to attack. Economic forces were slow to generate change. Successive governments had intervened in determination of wages in the industry. The wage system was seen as the historical record of layers of wage settlements in which particular payments lay unconformably on top of one another. Even before nationalisation the industry had been urged to modernise its wage system.