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Industrial Composition, Methods of Compensation and Real Earnings in the Great Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Robert A. Hart  and
J. Elizabeth Roberts
Robert A. Hart*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling and IZA
J. Elizabeth Roberts
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
*
E-mail: r.a.hart@stir.ac.uk
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Abstract

A major objective of the government during the Great Recession has been severely to restrict public sector real wage growth. One potential advantage of performance-related pay schemes is that they naturally offer greater wage responsiveness to fluctuations in the business cycle. Based on evidence from engineering and allied industries during the Great Depression we show that piecework wages exhibited more flexibility than their timework equivalents. We compare and contrast southern/midland engineering districts of Britain with northern districts. The former region was dominated by piece-rated workers and by modern sections of the industry, such as vehicle and aircraft manufacture. Time-rated work predominated in northern districts where older sections – for example, marine and textile engineering – were clustered‥

Keywords

industrial compositionpieceworktimeworkreal earningsthe Great DepressionE32J31J33N64
Type
Research Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 226 , November 2013 , pp. R17 - R29
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

This work was funded by ESRC Grant RES-000–22–3574. We are grateful to the Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF) for allowing access to their payroll records and to Warwick University Modern Record Centre and Glasgow University Archive Centre for their help in assembling the data and to Andrew Currall for his excellent work in data transcription. We thank a reviewer and the editors for their comments. The full EEF data base, containing all EEF data and accompanying unemployment rates used in this project, is available at the UK Data Archive, Study 5569 (http://www.esds.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=5569).

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