Wages Councils—Are they an Anachronism?

In July 1985 the government decided in favour of major reform of wages councils. It restricted their scope to setting minimum hourly and overtime rates of pay and removed people under 21 completely from their coverage. This raises questions about the functions of wages councils within the British industrial relations system. There is a need to adopt an industrial relations perspective on wages councils. Contemporary debate on the continued usefulness of wages councils is biased against them by virtue of failing to recognise that they exist not only to protect workers from low pay, but also represent state attempts to create collective bargaining and industrial democracy in situations where the capacity of workers for collective organisation has been too low to support voluntary developments. All these different identities of wages councils need to be understood and combined to achieve a comprehensive conception of their actual significance. There is a need for more research based on appropriate methodologies, studying the wages council sector itself and for studies to measure the effects of wages councils on efficiency and productivity.