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Chapter V. Incomes Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Extract

The economic forecasts in Chapter I, and the examination of the problems of the medium term in Chapter IV, provide the background for the discussion about the successor policy to the £6 limit. The negotiations with the trade union leaders (and surely at some stage also with the CBI) should cover not simply questions of earnings and prices, but questions of output and employment as well. A useful starting point for discussion would be a set of forecasts with different earnings assumptions, similar to the forecasts for the 6 per cent and 20 per cent case which have been presented in Chapter I. The important point which these alternative simulations make is that a bigger increase in money earnings leads to a short-term gain in real wages net of tax, followed by a longer-term loss which exceeds the short-term gain. It is very hard to persuade people that, collectively, they will be better off with lower than with higher increases in money earnings; but over a longer period it is clearly true.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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References

Note (1) page 75 HMSO. Cmnd. 6151.

Note (1) page 76 Firms can, of course, find themselves in basically the same situation when it is market pressures, rather than the rulings of the Price Commission, which prevent them from raising prices.

Note (2) page 76 In Sweden there are industrial strike funds which are intended to deal with this kind of situation.

Note (1) page 77 Sue Ward and Chris Pond, ‘The £6 trap’, Low Pay Paper no. 6, Low Pay Unit, London, July 1975.

Note (2) page 77 The TUC, in its comment on the Social Contract, has said that the flat-rate approach ‘was not envisaged as a permanent policy for continually eroding differentials either between or within negotiating groups’. (The Development of the Social Contract, London, July 1975).

Note (1) page 79 HMSO, Cmnd. 6151.