Abstract
At first glance, the case for a political consensus in industrial relations policy in the postwar years seems a strong one. Both parties maintained a commitment to full employment and both supported free collective bargaining as the basic system for negotiating wages and conditions of work. When faced with the problem of inflation, both sought to develop controls on prices and wages: promoting productivity bargaining as the means to contain the wage-price spiral which was commonly assumed to threaten Britain’s industrial performance. Although the Conservative governments of the 1950s were more reluctant to adopt such strategies, there still appears to be a degree of continuity in industrial relations policy in the immediate postwar decades.
The author would like to thank Harriet Jones, Neil Rollings, Nick Tiratsoo, Jim Tomlinson and Jonathan Zeitlin for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I remain solely responsible for the shortcomings of the argument presented here.
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Notes
N. Whiteside, ‘Social Welfare and Industrial Relations, 1914–39’, in C.J. Wrigley, ed., History of British Industrial Relations, 1914–1939, 1987, Brighton, Harvester.
N. Rollings, ‘“The Reichstag Method of Governing”? The Attlee Governments and Permanent Economic Controls’, in H. Mercer, N. Rollings and J. Tomlinson, eds., Labour Governments and Private Industry, 1992, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
J. Tomlinson, ‘The Labour Government and the Trade Unions, 1940–45’, in N. Tiratsoo, ed., The Attlee Years, 1991, London, Pinter, p. 100. Also PRO: T172/2033.
See, for example, N. Tiratsoo, ‘The Motor Car Industry’, in AAA Mercer, AAA Rollings and AAA Tomlinson, 1992.
R. Jones, Wages and Employment Policy, 1987, London, Allen and Unwin, pp. 18–19.
N. Rollings, ‘Controls and Butskellism’; unpublished paper presented to the Economic History Conference, Hull, April 1993, p. 4.
Cited in N. Tiratsoo and J. Tomlinson, Industrial Efficiency and State Regulation: Labour, 1939–1951, 1993, London, Routledge, p. 165.
See essays by S. Tolliday and N. Whiteside, in S. Tolliday and J. Zeitlin, eds., Shop Floor Bargaining and the State, 1985, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Also essay by R. Hyman, in J. Fyrth, ed., Labour’s High Noon, 1993, London, Lawrence and Wishart.
H. Jones, ‘The Conservative Party and the Welfare State, 1942–55’, 1992, unpublished doctoral thesis, London School of Economics, ch. 4.
For the example of the docks, see G. Phillips and N. Whiteside, Casual labour, 1985, Oxford, Oxford University Press, ch. 8.
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© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Whiteside, N. (1996). The Politics of the ‘Social’ and the ‘Industrial’ Wage, 1945–60. In: Jones, H., Kandiah, M. (eds) The Myth of Consensus. Contemporary History in Context Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24942-8_7
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