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Another look at low pay1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
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Age, lack of skill, employment in certain industries, all contribute to low pay – but with what weight? The purpose of this study is to present evidence that age and skill have been underestimated and the industrial effect misconstrued as factors in low pay. We then attempt to spell out the handicaps of the low paid in labour markets, of which high rates of unemployment are the main sign.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972
Footnotes
*
Lecturer in Economics, London School of Economics.
†
Research Department, General and Municipal Workers' Union.
1
We would like to thank the following for help: E. Reeves and D. W. Flaxen of the Department of Employment, for unpublished data from the 1970 Earnings Survey: K. Matthews and Mrs K. Jensen, E.D.A.R.C, for research assistance: H. Johnson, D. Metcalf, P. Wiles, P. Doeringer, C. Foster and members of the L.S.E Seminar on Poverty for comments.
References
2 The point is made and evidence presented in National Board for Prices and Incomes, General Problems of Low Pay, Report no. 169 (HMSO Cmnd. 4648, 1971), p. 55.Google Scholar
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4 D.E. Gazettes, November 1970–February 1971. We are also grateful to the Department for providing some unpublished tabulations.
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9 The Department of Employment's 1970 Earnings Survey – from whose published and unpublished tabulations most of our data are drawn – classifies workers by three skill levels. The classification is most comprehensive for unskilled, in the sense that it covers most of the workers who are counted as unskilled in the Census. The coverage only differs from the Census in the exclusion of certain relatively minor occupations – messengers, porters and ticket collectors, stevedores and dock labourers, lorry driver's mates, kitchen hands and cleaners. The skilled and semi-skilled classifications are less comprehensive and exclude many such workers outside manufacturing. The all-manual category is however an exhaustive count of all such workers in the economy, which covers the three skill categories and the residual group.
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